The Joe Rogan Experience - #551 - Graham Hancock

Episode Date: September 18, 2014

Graham Hancock is an English author and journalist, well known for books such as "Fingerprints Of The Gods" & "Entangled" and also a new fiction book called "War God".

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! My friends, Graham Hancock I'll take these off since you're not wearing them Good to see you, buddy Nice to see you, Joe, good to be back Good to see you returning from floating

I saw your tweet, which showed a picture of... It looked like someone was in space Yeah, because that's how it felt that's how it felt to me now I have to thank you for this because you're the guy who turned me on to floating I never did it before

you spoke to me about it last year I was so harassed and so rushed I never got I never got a chance to do it I thought I'd do it

when I got back to England it didn't happen so I got in touch with your friend Crash a few weeks before I came out here and he very kindly fitted me in and I

think his place is called float labs yeah technologies area before there they're in Venice Beach so it's a totally new experience for me and what made the experience even more surreal and special because I had asked for an appointment fairly late in the day was that I mean he needed more notice he's constantly booked up yeah amazing what he could give me was the two rooms, one for myself, one for my wife, Santa, at midnight. At midnight, two nights in a row. And actually, there's something about floating at midnight, which I think is really special. I don't do any floating during the day.

Right, right. It's a really good time. It's a really good time to do it. Yeah. the day right right it's a really good time it's a really good time to do it yeah so we went along to venice beach and parked the car and crash came out and took us in first of all he showed us his collection of african masks and he has got the most amazing slightly fearsome collection of african masks up there that's really incredible actually yeah this is a deep guy he's he's he's a trip thinking about a lot of a lot of stuff and

yeah i've met i mean i've spent a lot of time in africa i've never seen a collection like that it's just just amazing dogan you know some of the really fascinating peoples in there and their masks then he takes us down he talks us through what it is so you know um you go into this room and in it i i've seen in some places they have like a pod where you close a you close a lid over yourself but that's not what he's got he's got a bigger room than that and there's a big full size feels like a huge metal safe um if you have trust issues you know it's a little bit you've got to you're going to close yourself up in a huge metal safe in the darkness it takes a little bit you know a little bit of courage as i would say is required

to to do that at midnight on venice beach but we did it and and you know we go in there at certain warnings you don't want to get the salty water in your eyes yeah if you do it's a big distraction you don't want to get it in your ears because it's going to block you so you wear earplugs it doesn't bother me i just go in with my ears i don't wear i think i would prefer to because because the feeling of being completely deaf was slightly was slightly alarming for me although i realize a sensory deprivation is part of the deal yeah um and and uh so you close the door there's a towel hanging off the back of the door in case you do get salty water in your eyes and then you just lie down in this i guess body temperature saline solution in which it's in which it's impossible to sink and and there you are in the darkness

completely without without sensation totally by yourself for the first time in a way ever i mean this is the sometimes we're alone but to be completely alone in total darkness, suspended in that amniotic fluid, that strange saline solution with no sensations coming in, no sounds, no light. It's an extraordinary opportunity to meditate, to reflect, to just drift away into another place and not, there's the only danger I would say it happened to me. I kept, I find it difficult to shut down my mind. My mind is always running. And a few times when I was just wanting to let everything go, everyday concerns and worries came back in and started and started annoying me.

But most of the time I was able to let go and it felt like I was weightless and I was floating, floating in space. That's why I posted that picture on Facebook today because that's what it felt like. And sometimes I didn't know whether I was horizontal or vertical. I felt like, I felt sometimes like I was vertically, floating vertically. It was a very odd sensation. I wouldn't say that I got into deeply trippy space, but I did have fundamental visions, patterns, light started to generate purple, purple strips of light started to appear, which certainly were not there in the darkness with me. And that was interesting. But most of all, it was just very relaxing, just very relaxing to let go, be completely supported by this soft, gentle water and drift away into the

realms of the mind. It was a wonderful experience. And I felt much better about it the second day than I did the first. The first day was some unfamiliarity. The second night, last night, was just amazing. Yeah, that's what it's all about. It's all about getting used to the experience, and the more you get used to the experience, the easier it is to slip into the deeper and deeper states. Yes. But the first time, it's very alien. It's so odd, and you also kind of bump against the sides, and you have to center yourself.

And I've just seen Crash's African masks as well. Yeah, he probably shouldn't show you those before you go into total darkness in a meat locker. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But, yeah, the second day is so much better. And so much so, it's made me think maybe I should get myself a float thing. Oh, you definitely should. It's huge.

I love having one. I love knowing that anytime I want to go in there, I could just go in there. Are they loads and loads of money or are they okay?

Yeah. They're loads and loads of money. They're not cheap. They're like thousands and thousands of dollars. Yeah. Especially the flash ones.

The crash ones, rather. The original one that I got, which was a Samadhi tank, I think that was like six or seven thousand dollars but crashes are more like 30 okay because it's like a car yeah yeah it's like it's like buying it's like buying a car and it's also it has these incredible filters that it's set up through like it he has

it set up like the one that i have in my house i'm the only one who goes in it but if you it's a commercial grade filtration system right like he filters things through ozone there's all these different various steps that it takes he's written like an entire like multi i don't know how many pages probably like 50 or 60 page uh booklet right on the the necessity for different types of filtration and you know what he i mean he's an obsessive guy yes and his obsession with tanks has made he's there's a guy in austin that has some really amazing tanks too that does it a little bit differently he he does it through a um um a company that makes boats and his are really

excellent too but crash is like the leader of the pack. He's the master of the game. There was nothing like his stuff when his stuff came out. Now there's guys like the guy in Austin that is elevating his, and I spent some time there and checked out his facility. It's beautiful. He's friends with my friend Aubrey. But what Crash did was there was no innovation going on in the United States when it came to float technology.

There was like the standard Samadhi tank, which is really great. I mean, it's cool. You could definitely get a cool experience in it. And then there's some home models that a few people had. But what he did is he just took everything to the next level and made everything these steel modular boxes that it fits together perfectly. steel modular boxes that it fits together perfectly, more sound deadening, more insulation, better filtration system, stronger reinforced sides. Because the Samadhi ones would kind of bow out on the sides a little bit from the water,

and sometimes they would rot, and you had to get things replaced. He fixed everything. He fixed, there was an issue with the linings would burn out sometimes because of the heat pads. The heat pads would short out. It would burn through the linings and they would leak water everywhere. Right. He fixed that by, first of all, by setting like this redundant system and having two heat pads too. So if one burns out, you have a second one ready to go.

And then secondly, he put these thick pond filters. He doesn't use like the same kind of filters that a lot of people do not filters rather uh liners right his liners are very thick they're for like koi ponds okay so he's done a lot of innovation he's really figured out a lot of different things it's the place to go if you're lucky enough to live in la well also if you're lucky enough to be able to get in now because now he's booked way in advance that's what i found i mean i wrote to him i wrote to him at least four weeks ago yeah and there were just no slots available during the day he that's why he gave me the two midnight slots although actually i'm really glad he gave me them the midnight slots that's the way to do it late at night's the way i understand he's opening a new unit in westwood yes where there'll be seven yeah that's not enough no even seven's not enough i

mean there's not there's you could open up one somewhere that has 50, and that sucker would be filled all day. It would be filled. There's 20 million people in LA. So there's not so many other people doing this in LA right now? There's a few. I think people are starting to become aware of it now. It's growing. It's a fabulous experience.

We all need this experience. of it now. It's growing. It's a fabulous experience. We all need this experience. One question I have and wonder about, what about if you have a joint before you get in or take some psilocybin, what would that do? I don't know what it's like to not do that before you go in.

You do that every time. Not psilocybin, but I have. But the pot is the edible way to go for me. Okay, so you eat about an hour before. Yeah, a terrifying supply of edibles, a terrifying dose where you're just like,

oh, what did I do? And then I get in there. That's what I like to do. Okay, that's what I'd like to do as well if I hadn't given up pot three years ago. Makes me very humble. There's something about getting in there. And because I've done it so many times uh but you know because i have the tank in my house i'm super

comfortable i can i can get relaxed with floating it's a normal thing to me so when you're on the edibles too it just takes you to these really really really bizarre places no moments of paranoia or fear you just calm there um i mean i wouldn't say that um i'm pretty good with that though i mean um if i had real problems with paranoia and fear i wouldn't be able to do everything i do for a living sure you know what i mean everything i do this is live yeah you know everything i do when i do commentary for the UFC, that's live. Stand-up is live. Very edgy. Yeah.

All these things are all live, and they all depend on maintaining your sanity under sometimes pretty intense pressure. So I don't have those paranoia or fear issues, but I certainly feel the the thoughts i just don't indulge them and i feel the thoughts but it's like a lot of way to go not indulge them yeah it's like a lot of psychedelic experiences it's a matter of controlling the mindset and i kind of equate it to just the ability to communicate on the internet and the ability to access information on the internet has led us to this weird place where if you wanted to your day could be filled with horror you could just go every day to the worst possible websites and see the most horrific videos and the most horrific photographs and see

the world in the worst possible light if you chose to just immerse yourself you know just watch the news yeah i mean even worse than the news. I mean, if you really wanted to really change the way you saw the world. Yeah. I mean, you could live on a beautiful treat line street with the nicest neighbors and, you know, the cutest little dogs barking

and the life looks beautiful. Yeah. But through the portal that is the internet, you can immerse yourself in the most twisted, sadistic minds. And it's like you have this decision to not do that. And in sort of reinforcing that decision and making those choices, you build up your resistance to doing things that are negative. You build up your resistance to indulging in negative thoughts and in that sense i think it's good like one of the weirdest things is if you've

ever seen someone who's never been in any sort of a conflict type situation but they get thrown into one and they have a panic attack yeah and they hyperventilate and they don't know what to do it's very weird i've seen it happen many times i've seen it happen and then i've seen other people that are in panic situations or or rather um high stress situations a lot and they know how to stay calm and keep cool and i think sometimes your life can depend on it sure very much as a killer yes scuba diving which i did a lot of panic panic will kill you oh i would imagine i'm terrified of scuba diving i've never done it yeah but I would imagine that being 100 feet down in the ocean while the winds

are moving the currents banging you against rocks and stuff. That's got to be... You lose it down there and you're really gone. Yeah, yeah. That's a whole other world.

I did some snorkeling recently with dolphins. Right. I was in Hawaii and I actually did it with my four-year-old too. I took her with me into the water and you know

She had this the mask on and everything and she's like looking down and we've seen the dolphins swimming under us It was amazing really incredibly rewarding. Did they come and scan you? No, they didn't But they they just swam underneath us, right, you know, they really didn't give a shit about us It was really kind of one of those weird-looking things they just you know, it's it's kind of um it's an eye-opener like how little of a shit dolphins care they don't care about you man as long as you're not trying to capture them they're like more people whatever yeah avoid the boat you know they came near the boat i've been um around them though when they're very playful too like uh we were fishing once and they were jumping by the boat and being really playful with us.

This was a totally different experience. This was they just pretty much indifferent, but so beautiful. Like just being around them, hundreds of dolphins. And you're just looking at them swimming underneath you. But yeah, I can imagine that panic in that world. Well, something goes wrong, you know, at depth in a current. If you panic, you literally are dead. That's when you have to stay steady.

And that's the power of the mind. It's mind over matter. You have to impose your mind on that situation because, you know, I don't know why, actually, if we have all this evolution, why we panic. I mean, they would have thought millions of years of evolution would have got rid of that terrible, dangerous thing called panic. But actually, it's there. Well, fight or flight, though, is so necessary. It sharpens your reflexes.

It's one of the things about fighters is that a fighter going into a fight and not being nervous can be incredibly dangerous. Yes. And when I was competing, there were moments that i was too confident and i went in and i couldn't compete right i didn't i couldn't and i also couldn't snap myself out of it right like there's a level that you achieve when you're really nervous yeah and you're not sure of what the outcome is going to be there's like a level of reaction and of intensity that you achieve when you go into the into a competition where

you're scared where you perform so much better right right and then there's like when you're super confident yeah you there's something that happens where you're not nervous at all you can't get up for it like it's a weird thing that happens right so that adrenaline is i think it's a necessary component it gives you that extra charge. It's just about managing that. And managing it is very difficult. It was interesting. I watched, I told you a few moments ago, I watched this Hicks and Gracie movie.

Choke. Called Choke. Yeah. And that's one of the things that he said quite early on in the movie. He said, actually, he's always afraid. He doesn't say, I am a fearless person. He says, I'm always afraid. Yeah.

And, yeah, it's managing. It's managing that. What a formidable fighter, that guy. Yeah, he's an amazing guy, too. We had him on the podcast recently, him and my friend Eddie Bravo together. It was just a huge treat for me as a martial arts, lifelong martial arts practitioner practitioner a fan because he's a real master fascinating fascinating guy yeah that documentary i recommend that to everybody even people that don't do martial arts like yourself you wait how did you hear about it okay well my son-in-law

jason saris does mixed martial arts he he does particularly brazilian jujitsu at a place called the mma clinic in lond. And he does it three, four times a week. He's very, very, very devoted to it. And he's, he's been talking me through a lot of these issues over the last year. And, uh, I, I get it. I get, I get why he loves it. And I think it's been, I think it's been a really great thing for him. And I think it's a really, it's a really great thing for anybody. There was a time in my life when I did do a martial art. I did Aikido. I got to Brown Belt in my very early 20s. And then I quit. I'm not quite sure why. I traveled. I went away. I'd lost the practice. And then in my 40s, I went back to it. And I went my way back up to Green Belt. But Aikido is a different thing from from this this real grappling i mean this

brazilian jiu-jitsu what i see is two two people who are interlocked and they're they're sense they're sensing each other each other's movements all the time is you can't you can't predict what's going to happen next in any in any way and and i understand that it's a kind of meditative thing also that that if the if you actually start I imagine, because I don't do it, but this is what my son-in-law tells me. If you start thinking while you're in there, in that grapple with that other very strong, very dangerous person, I don't think that's really good. I think you have to not be thinking. You have to be acting somehow on muscle, memory, on instinct, on experience. You're not really thinking

through your next move or are you i don't know sometimes you're thinking but a lot of times you are reacting on in a in what you try to do is achieve sort of a zen state a flow state and when you're at your best you're in that flow state where sometimes you'll be in a position where you don't even realize how you achieve the position you just you just instinctively did it and it's instinctive based on thousands of repetitions many many hours of mat time mat time is very important mat time being the actual sparring itself right because the the rolling the grappling sparring yeah you you understand like the language of human interaction like there's a there's an interaction between a person attacking, a person defending, and there's just like this thing that goes on where you kind of figure out.

Yes. And this is something that in daily life in our modern technological society, most people have no experience of at all. They're never in a fight situation. They're never ever having to deal with that so if they suddenly find themselves in a situation of danger attacked on the street they're not going to have a faintest idea what to do no well hopefully that never comes up anyway but the benefits extend outside of that in my opinion the benefits are it's it's it prepares you for like the the drama of regular life pales in

comparison to the the real drama of training and of of competing inside the gymnasium like because essentially every time someone does jiu-jitsu they're competing every time you you spar even if you spar with a very good friend you're still competing you know you you you get used to this struggle and that's something that most people don't they don't have in their life right and in in having that struggle and in this competition it makes the regular stress that people go through the stress of bills and of relationships and it it alleviates and mitigates a lot of the issues that people have because the the life or death struggle of someone trying to choke you and you battling it out and you're tired you're exhausted and you're trying to remain calm and catch your breath and defend

and trying to stay cool and trying to figure out what's the proper defense for this situation and how to turn this around and how to get back to a better spot. It's so harrowing. And it's so stressful. But in a good way. So you're totally in the moment. Yes. Oh, yeah. Totally in the moment.

There's no time for any other shit. Some girl you dated when you were in high school. Where is she now? You're not thinking about that. Or the bills you've's no time for any other shit. Some girl you dated when you were in high school. Where is she now? You're not thinking about that. Or the bills you've got to pay or anything like that. No, you're not thinking about any of those things. And in that sense, it is very meditative. It alleviates a lot of the stress of life.

And then when it's over, you just kind of feel very relaxed because you've spent all this excess energy that I believe people... I mean, it's not a scientific way of looking at the human body but i think of the human body in a lot of ways as sort of like a battery yeah and a lot of people's batteries are overflowing with juice because you don't use them you sit down in a sedentary state in front of a computer all day which is pretty bad for your back and you stare at a screen and you do your work and then you sit in your car or on the train or whatever to get home and then you sit in front of the television that's that's a lot of people's lives

absolutely that's not normal for a body no the body is supposed to be moving while you're young and alive and while you have energy you're supposed to be your body wants to be involved in activities your body wants to go hiking and do things and and if it doesn't it atrophies and shrivels up and it stops being functional and when you can get all that energy out um in in a training session it does a couple things one it strengthens your body so that if you ever do have to use it for something even if something as simple as like picking things up or you know just strength to to help move something yeah you have that but two, you alleviate all the excess energy. Yeah. You drain the battery a bit.

And by draining the battery, you put more juice in the battery for the future. Like the battery has like a higher threshold. And then you also like, you can deal with stuff easier. Yeah. Like when I don't train, if I don't exercise, if I don't do some sort of rigorous physical exercise, like at least a few days a week, I react differently to stress. Right. You start getting snappish.

Yeah. Well, I get more irritated than I should. It affects me more than it should. But when I train, like if I train a lot, everything is pretty easy. Yeah. I've seen this effect on my son-in-law. His couple of years now of doing this, he's been, it's really transformed him. It's a really, really great thing. A lot of people

can benefit from it. I mean, I'm 64 years old. I don't know. I don't think I can go and do that stuff now. I don't know. You could if you found another 64-year-old. Yeah. Okay. Or I could work with one personal teacher, you know, who would understand my

level. i see huge advantages in doing it i think it's i've got more and more interested in it over the last couple of years it's really fascinating thing and also tell me about this i mean in a way you're being a warrior in there in a way in a way it's a warrior thing i mean this is a contentious issue the human race we've been around in anatomically modern form for the last 200,000 years. For a lot of that time, our young men in many societies have been called to warfare in one form or another. I would say that it's gone on long enough for it to be a fundamental part of the human experience, actually. In our society today, a lot has worked to move that aside. And probably that's a very

good thing. Although we still do have war, of course, but it's done at a distance, largely. It's done, it's not, I mean, I'm writing novels about the Spanish conquest of Mexico at the moment. I am dealing with, I'm getting inside the heads of warriors. And those guys are on the battlefield hand to hand with edged weapons. That kind of experience of battle and warfare doesn't happen, I think, much in modern warfare today. It's more the guy remotely piloting a drone and shooting people from a distance. But maybe there is a warrior need in us which can be met in a harmless and positive way

on the mat in something like mixed martial arts. That's what I'm coming to. Would you agree with that or not? It's very possible that there's something to that that or not it's very possible that there's something to that i think it's very possible that there's something to the idea that we have ingrained in us a certain amount of experiences based on the genetics of all the people that have lived before us and that whatever fight or flight is inside of us whatever you know i mean throughout history like i've been discussing this with friends like how fascinating this time is because throughout history in the past if a

boat of strangers showed up it was very dangerous yeah a boat showed up and you're like holy shit it's gonna get crazy a bunch of men climb off the boat you gotta hide women and children and now when a boat shows up it's tourism and everybody gets excited like oh we need their money yeah come on come to this island come to this place yes bring your family yes it's a completely different world that we live in it is and those those experiences that led us to that led the human race in 2014 these experiences of people pirates showing up and vikings showing up and all those dangerous people showing up in these different places. People coming over the hill, an army's coming.

That was just a part of being a human being for the longest time. For a very long time. Have you seen this new thing that was going on about the autopsy of which king of England was it? Richard II or Richard III. Yeah, they found his bones, which is really amazing, man. They found his bones, like, they found it under, like, a parking lot or something like that? In a car park, yeah, a parking lot, yeah. How crazy is that, man?

I know, I know. How do they know it's him? I think that there's a long tradition regarding him and the battle that he was killed in, and there's a famous, there's even a Shakespeare play where he's at the end of the battle saying famously my horse my horse a horse a horse my kingdom for a horse so that he can flee but it seems that he died in in face-to-face combat and yeah this was hacked to pieces as far as like one of the last of the the the Kings to die like that to write a die in yeah. We're in the sort of late 1400s there, I would say

so. I mean, combat went on. The period I'm writing about, early 1500s, was brutal and bloody. Brutal and bloody period. A man like Hernan Cortes is a leader, but he's a killer. He's a cold-blooded killer.

I think that kind of experience is rare today. Does it freak you out when you read stuff about these days and realize that that all could happen today? We just need the wrong set of events to take place. We're not far removed as a species from that time. In terms of actual history, it's the blink of an eye between then and now. Absolute blink of an eye. We are the same people.

Nothing's changed. There's been some social changes. But look, we're still slaughtering people on large scale, in large scale levels. It's just that that hand-to-hand, face-to-face thing, technology has intervened a little bit in that. that hand-to-hand, face-to-face thing, technology has intervened a little bit in that. If our society were to go into a radical collapse, people could find themselves facing those contingencies very quickly, very, very, very rapidly. And it is, in fact, in a radical collapse in other parts of the world. I've been talking

about this on stage a lot lately, because there's a lot of these this is Duck Dynasty guy It's hilarious. It's Duck Dynasty this is ridiculous American reality show, but one of the main guys on Duck Dynasty He gave this speech this video speech where he was talking about the impending apocalypse and What they call the rapture, where Christians think that Jesus is going to come and he's going to take away everybody that's Christian and bring them to heaven and everybody else is going to be stuck on earth. I believe there's a very elite group are going to go. 144,000 of them are going to be floated up to the clouds.

Is that what the idea is? Apparently so, yeah, with the rapture. And he told people that they should watch this nicholas cage movie that's about to come out called left behind that's based on this very famous series of books right amongst the christians left behind okay and like these these people have you mean he doesn't he's somebody who doesn't get raptured is that is that the i guess yeah i don't know it's so fucking stupid it's so stupid it's it hurts my brain to talk about it but what's fascinating is that they're all worried about, everyone's worried about the apocalypse. Yes.

The apocalypse, the apocalypse, the end, the end. But the apocalypse, if you go to certain parts of the world, it's there. It's there. It's in Liberia right now. It's in Somalia right now. Right now. Listen, back in the 1970s, I lived in Mogadishu. I lived in Somalia. I lived in thatadishu. I lived in Somalia.

I lived in that failed state. It was a fine place then. Back then it was fine. Yeah, it was fine. Why was it fine? I mean, this is not politically correct, but it was run by a dictator. And he kept things calm. Well, that has been the case in many unfortunate scenarios.

I mean, that's what's argued about Iraq. If you looked at Iraq before the US invasion, it was largely superior to what it is now. Vastly superior to what it is now. Again, I mean, we're not, you know, kind of not supposed to say these things. Honestly, for the average Iraqi living in Iraq, things were a whole lot better under Saddam Hussein. It was peaceful. There was not a lot of inter-religious conflict. It was a secular state. It was a secular state, in fact, quite tolerant.

And all you had to do was not get in the face of Saddam Hussein. That was the simple rule of life. Just don't get in the face of Saddam Hussein. And that was the simple rule of life in Somalia in the 1970s. Don't get in the face of Siad Barre if you do. I'll tell you a story. Siad Barre, Mohamed Siad Barre, who was the president of Somalia when I went there in 1975, he did a number of interesting things. For example, the Somali language was not written.

This was a nomadic society, 70% nomadic. He introduced a written script for the Somali language based on the Latin alphabet. This had not been possible before because religious leaders had said they had to have it in the Arabic script because they were Muslims. He just forced that through. Then he introduced a family law which allowed women to divorce their husbands. At that point, 11 religious leaders, 11 sheikhs, mobilized the public and said they had to rebel against Syed Barre. Well, what he did, he hauled those guys out of the mosque the very same day and shot them all.

And that was the end of that argument. And suddenly women could divorce their husbands. And the society was very free and very open. One can't imagine today from the scenes of horror that we see from Mogadishu actually how peaceful it was. So, you know, it may be the case that in some situations in Iraq is definitely another example. You know, we in the West are constantly saying we must have democracy. Democracy is a great thing. Well, maybe it is a great thing at a certain point, at a certain level. When you're in a society that's very sectarian,

very divided into tribal interests, very divided into different religious groups, maybe it's actually more comfortable if you have a dictator. Well, there's a power vacuum issue. I think the issue is civilizations largely operate on momentum. Yeah. And when things have been set up in the way that they have been in Iraq or the way they have been, obviously, in Somalia, where there's one guy who's calling all the shots and they've got this whole thing established, when that guy's not there anymore and then everyone's scrambling to be the new guy. Everyone's scrambling.

It creates chaos. Absolute chaos absolute it's horrific and hell and it creates this intense violence amongst the people like the they are iraq the the people that are in that civil war state that they're at now where various sections of their population are vying for control of this failed state. It's horrific. It's horrific You have this hideous death cult called the Islamic State Yeah Which may or may not have been initially funded and set up by the United States of America and its allies who knows? Who knows but it's a death cult and it's horrible give it frankly. I would rather have Saddam Hussein than the Islamic State Yeah, it's a crazy thing to say right the? The one evil is better than the other evil.

Obviously, we're only talking in objective reality terms here. We're not like saying, hey, it's okay to be a dictator. No, not at all. It's evil to be a dictator, clearly. Saddam Hussein is a terrible person. It's evil and wrong. Ideally, we move to a situation where we have no governments and where people run their own lives and peacefully negotiate with one another another but that isn't the way it's

going down in iraq and it's not the way it's gone down in southern part of somalia yeah i mean that would be ideal right but it's really hard to run a bunch of people like the idea of a society the idea of taking a million people 500 million million people, whatever the number is, and having a group of people that adhere to the best interests of all the folks that are in that society, their needs are so varied. Their resources are so varied. Their fortune and what situation they find themselves born into is so varied. And then you have the people that are fortunate sons and daughters that are trying to keep the unfortunate from getting into their gated community of life. Absolutely. There's so much craziness.

And you can be sure that dictators' sons and daughters are all very well looked after in a dictatorship. Of course. That always happens, like Saddam's kids, like Siad Barre's kids. It's always the case, you know, that they are, and that then generates feelings of anger and fury that that is happening. But a situation where just bullets are flying down the street constantly and you live in permanent fear of your life, that's not good either.

Yeah, the arguments that the United States has funded ISIS in order to build up support for an invasion of Saudi Arabia or of Syria, rather, are really terrifying. And more terrifying because I don't want to look into it because I don't want to know it's a horrible thought Yeah, it's like I don't even want to know I know that that kind of shit has happened before So when you see that it's happening now you're like oh fuck is this really going on? Yeah, because that really what's causing all this profoundly depressing and depressing. And the problem is that we can't really believe anything that our political leaders in the West say.

I mean, they have been proven to be absolute crooks, thieves, and liars. They lie by instinct all the time. And the problem with constant lying at the top levels of politics is that it pollutes the debate completely. You suddenly can't believe anything that's said. And that leads to suspicion of all kinds of horrendous possibilities, including the funding and setting in motion of this ISIS horror. Yeah, it doesn't help when someone like Julian Assange comes along

and exposes all these things that a lot of people disagree with. And what do they do? They try to get them locked up on some trumped up charges and export them as if they were really trying to export him from from you know to to sweden and eventually to the united states because of some sexual thing that wasn't even it seems so violent or it wasn't even rape it was consensual some weird sexual charge like i think they call it surprise sex or something like that It's not they're not even calling it rape right there's one thing like if there was a woman who was saying hey Julian Assange She's a piece of shit. He drugged me raped me. You know okay?

Yeah, send that guy to Sweden, but they're not even saying that okay This isn't a charge that makes any sense and the fact that this guy's been locked up in the embassy in London for all these years It's crazy. It's a very crazy situation. It's really weird to see, man. It's really weird to see him on television doing these Skype interviews and knowing that he's in this embassy. And the moment he steps out of that, they're going to snatch him up. It's like he's just being protected by some weird loophole.

Yes. Well, you could take sanctuary in an embassy. It's an old law. But you can't leave. You can't leave. Like, he's going to have to dig a hole underneath that motherfucker.

A mile out. Yeah. Out of the street and then pop out of a manhole and then they're going to scoop him up in a car and take him to Costa Rica or somewhere

where they're going to honor his... No, we live in a time when there are just constant conspiracy theories. I mean, there's even conspiracy theories about him, you know, that he is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Of course. All of that happens. Nothing is believed anymore.

And that comes from the proven fact that our political leaders are actually liars. Absolutely. They've lied to us again and again. And how can we trust them? How can we entrust ourselves to them when they behave in that way? What's needed is transparency. What's needed is openness. Do you think that transparency is going to be an eventuality

because of the Internet? It's happening, yeah. I think it is, right? Everything gets blown wide open. It's very difficult to keep secrets. And also it erodes faith in the the leadership when like is this a democracy is this a representative government or is it some sort of a weird dictatorship because if it is a democracy how the fuck are you keeping that guy locked up how is julian assange still locked up because do you i need to know please tell me what exactly he did that you

need to export him to the united states oh he released some information yeah which is our information we the citizens this is not you know information that should be kept secret it's not from a king it's relation it's it's information that someone who was being paid with taxpayer dollars did a bunch of shit that the united states doesn't agree with yeah everyone was upset by the information that was released yeah everyone was upset by that video the collateral murder video everyone was obsessed by this massive amount of of data that showed there was a lot of coercion a lot of lies a lot of a lot of stuff that we don't agree with yeah and because of that this guy is like public enemy number one.

That's so anti what we think of as the United States. Completely contrary to everything the United States stands for. Yeah, completely. And so in answer to your question, I would say, yes, it is some kind of weird dictatorship posturing and posing as a democracy. Because for democracy to be real, you have to have complete openness of information. People must be told the truth. Then they can vote and make decisions on the basis of facts.

What we actually have in our society is the continual, very clever massaging and management of information. So it ceases to be democracy when the voting public are fed lies on the basis of which they make their decisions and vote. That isn't democracy anymore. And in a way, democracies are the worst kind of dictatorship because they have this appearance of freedom. They have this illusion of freedom. And everybody can say, well, it's great because I live in a in a democracy at least if you live in a dictatorship you know you live in a dictatorship and there are certain parameters that you have to work your way around but when you live in a dictatorship that is posing as a democracy uh it's more complicated and it's where a lot of people

truly believe and act as if it is a democracy but at the very top there's fuckery and manipulation and coercion and money and corporate greed and interests and the military-industrial complex that is funding all these maneuvers and and it's people profiting wildly and not to forget all the big corporations big big pharmaceutical corporations all of this is about management of management of information that we that we are given so what the internet offers is the opportunity for for ordinary people who are not part of a power structure not running a big corporation to take power back to themselves and that is that is happening and yeah and it's

happening in a big way and it's very disturbing to the powers that be yeah people want like an instant change but it is almost instant the the the amount of time that we've actually spent having the internet has been pretty brief 1993 ish four ish is when it gave birth yes and then like 2014 where we're at now it's really only been around in this form for the last decade, like 2004, 2005. And then social media allowing people to exchange information in the heat of political crisis. Yes. Where they've been able to expose things that are happening in real time that ordinarily would be protected by the media. They would shelter and filter the information. Now, it's all just coming out and they can't.

So, they have to shut down the whole fucking internet in some of these countries. Which is a very difficult thing to do. Now I've seen the huge shift in power that this has introduced. There was a time just at my own small level as an author where I would have depended on the goodwill of the big media in order to get my ideas out there. And since my ideas have sometimes been radical and contradictory to the established order of things, it was very difficult to do that. Well, I don't need the big media anymore. I absolutely don't need them.

They're not required at all. They're redundant as far as I'm concerned. What is important is the community of like-minded people that I am reaching through social media, through Facebook, through my website. Not to say that Facebook

is perfect because Facebook is very problematic and is itself a large corporation which is filtering and controlling information but at least it's there.

It's something. There's some excellent things with Facebook though. One of the excellent things is that everyone is themselves. Yes. Like that is your Facebook account. When you're posting, this is who you are.

Yeah. For the most part. I mean, obviously, there's some frauds out there. Sure, there are. But a lot of when people are commenting, they're commenting using their Facebook identity. Yeah. So, like, that's a real person. Yeah.

As opposed to Twitter or a lot of message boards where you're getting trolls and a lot of assholes that are posting under fake names. And there's a lot of people out there that it's like a sport to them yeah like to be shitty or to rile people up like that it always puzzles me that i come i come across i get relatively little of it on my facebook pages i have an author facebook page i have a personal facebook page i run them both parallel but the same stuff on both of them there's one or two people who kind of haunt me there and and just always want to and just always want to say negative and unpleasant things. And my view is go for it, guy. Say those things if you want to.

Well, you're always going to get that if you're in the public eye. And the thing to be aware of is that it's a tremendous waste of – unless you're actually doing something evil and someone's trying to expose something, which you're clearly not. But if you were, then that kind of makes sense. Like these people are crusaders. But a lot of are just what what you call haters in the united states and the thing about haters is they're all losers yes there's no one that lives a fulfilled successful life with an awesome family a great relationship they're doing what they want to do for a living they're happy and at peace and they also go online and they're very hateful things and shit on people exactly no they're they're it's a mess of wasted energy yes like they're you know and some people are really good at it and it's like damn if you put

that energy into something productive instead of stalking graham hancock you know and fucking with them all day you could get a lot of shit done exactly probably a happier person exactly so the only answer at the receiving end of that is not to feed it yeah you know it's not to nourish it with angry or or hurted or you know hurt responses well that's what they're trying to do you know when someone's saying your research is shit your fucking books i wipe my ass with your book yeah yeah they're trying to fuck with you absolutely yeah and the the answer is the answer is somehow somehow what i try to do sometimes is to just respond with love you know just that's it's nice if it's true if it's real and i try to do the same if i can um sometimes it's really hard yeah it's hard but you do also agree i i definitely feel this about myself that some of the some of the criticism that I've received, even extreme criticism, even if it's unbalanced, I've benefited from.

Always. Yes. Always. It's useful. Yes. It's useful. There's something to learn from that. It's like that old saying, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

I mean, you have to learn from this. It's out there. We have to engage in some way with criticism. I've received an enormous amount of criticism from my work and for the suggestion that it was a lost civilization and the work that I've done on psychedelics and altered states of consciousness. Just endless. It's nonstop. And my view is thank you. Thank you for criticizing me.

I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for criticizing me. I appreciate it. If there are holes in what I'm saying, if my argument is weak in a particular area and they've made me rethink like what is the what is causing this reaction like what's is there anything that i could have done differently that could have avoided that or is this an necessary evil that just comes with the business like yes and it makes you think about things in a more complex way and although that might be uncomfortable i think there's some great benefit of it. There's some great benefit from it. And once again, it's putting us into a real social situation. As you say, these people are real. It's like being back in the village in the old days where you might be directly criticized by one or other of your fellow villagers. Well, now our village is the whole world. And it crosses all national boundaries

and all religious interests. It can be anybody anywhere who's taking an interest in you. And I'm constantly receiving information, some of it critical, some of it positive, through Facebook, in particular through Facebook, which is very helpful to me. And I really appreciate it. And I try the best I can. I try as much as I can do. I don't want to spend my entire day, morning to night, on Facebook. But I try to engage with it. I try to respond because I realize that people are giving me their time.

Somebody sends me a link to a story I haven't ever seen before. It's really important for my research. Thank you. That's really great. Twitter's giant for that for me just absolutely gigantic i've gotten more information from twitter more interesting uh websites that people have sent me to more interesting articles people sent me to than any other resource that i've ever come in contact with and it's just directly because of interacting with people and when they send me interesting things i retweet them yeah and then

you know those retweets get seen by a large number of people so people see that i do that so they send me more interesting stuff exactly it's really cool in that way i like that it's like a it's establishing a network and you know in that sense it's really it's a whole new situation which we've not not faced before done on a done on a gigantic scale and and um what it means is that information which used to be strictly controlled and in the hands of elites is now changing the power the power structure of information is changing entirely and that's a very that's potentially a very exciting new time to live in and great things are coming out of it and and it's easy to say this but i think a new consciousness is dawning in the world, actually.

I don't think it's very big yet. I think the old way of doing things is still extremely strong, but people are waking up to their power and saying, you know, I am not simply to be pushed around and told what to do by an expert or a government official or a corporation. And that's great. Yeah, I believe you're correct. And I think that it's hard to see while you're in the middle of it.

Yeah. Because it's all happening while we're participating in it. We are living in a time of extraordinary, rapid, unbelievable change. And when the history of this time, maybe things will settle down, maybe they won't, I don't know. But when the history of this time comes to be written, there'll have to be some perspective on it 200, 300 years from now. It will be seen as one of the most extraordinary moments

in the whole human story. My friend Amber Lyon has an interesting way of talking about certain events. And one of the things that she talks about when it comes to corporate control of information and things along the lines of the Julian Assange situation, she talks about being on the wrong side of history. And I think that's a very good point.

The people that are trying to suppress information in that way and the information that would directly affect the lives and not just but the consciousness of the entire culture yeah that that's the wrong side of history and then when exactly all things are said and done people trying to act in their best interest currently they don't realize like the fucking jig is up man you might be able to hang on and keep treading water for another three or four years yeah but the But the jig is up. Yeah. It's like the Inquisition was on the wrong side of history, you know, when it made Galileo say that actually the sun did revolve around the earth, even though he knew that the earth moved. It's clear that Galileo was on the right side of history.

We know that now. We've got perspective on it. We can look back with hindsight. And it's the same thing that's happening today in different ways. Yeah, it really is. It's just It's just more It's more intense because it's happening worldwide and it's all happening at the same time and we're seeing Positive and negative repercussions of it like these failed states that come about because of Arab Spring Yeah, like everybody says let's get rid of the dictator. And then, you know, Moe McCarthy gets killed.

Pandora's box is open. Yeah. Yeah. And now Libya is like this insane place. Hell world. Libya is a hell world. Syria is a hell world. Iraq's a hell world.

In every case, Pandora's box has been opened, and the immediate result has been that things got way worse than they were before. And then, you know, if we're talking about the dark side, the negative side of things as well, there is this horrible problem of bigoted religious fundamentalism, which is not confined to the Islamic world by any means. I mean, there are many Christian bigots as well. There's a tendency for people to cling on to old and devalued ideas and to have an almost religious fanatical commitment to them and be willing. I mean, what idea is worth killing another fellow human being for because they don't

share your idea? I mean, this is demonic. It it's a horrendous horrendous situation that this happens i followed a few guys on twitter that are a part of that whole islamic state there was a an article about this guy who was a rapper who is suspected a rapper from london suspected of being one of the guys that beheaded one of the american journalists and um i was following his twitter feed it's just like it's they they banned his twitter account right but it was you know it's just it was so strange to see what's going on and also strange to see his there was this thing that was going on with his interaction with the other uh the other people there was this intense camaraderie, this intense camaraderie with these other Islamic warriors, you know, that they all looked at it, everyone was brothers and sisters

and everyone was, you know, it was all, there was great intensity to all of the decisions that were being made and great intensity to the bonds they all had, you know, fighting against what they thought was the evil United States. And unfortunately, there was also some things that he said that, you know, they were talking about how everybody's freaking out that one head got cut off, one body part got cut off of this one guy. But what about the thousands of people that are blown to bits by these drones that no one's talking about?

And that's undeniable. That is undeniable. That is absolutely true two wrongs never make a right they do not the fact that the fact that that happens does not excuse the the cold-blooded slicing off of fellow human beings head but nevertheless it happens it should not we should not condemn the one without condemning the other as well absolutely and in fact the one you know you're talking about one individual as opposed to thousands of people that have been killed by drones that are innocent but completely

innocent people who are so-called collateral damage yeah we're just ripped apart by by our high-tech uh weapons you know which which which will behead a person in an in an instant slice body parts off just completely destroy that if you're lucky if you're not lucky they only break off a few things and then you suffer for the rest of your life in agonizing pain yeah so we have to own this we have to take that we have to accept that this is this is something we do we in the west are not innocent of this barbarity we're also part of it yeah it's is it we you know's the real thing. Well, that's the real thing because then you come back to the question of the manipulation of public opinion by very small interest groups who have a very unbalanced control of information. Right.

And then what does we mean? If it's not you and it's not I, do we take responsibility for people we don't even know doing things that are under the orders of people we also don't know and under the influence of corporations? We're not really exactly sure who's pulling the strings or how it's getting done or what politicians are moving what pieces into place and the whole thing. bad shit happen and not doing anything about it somehow or other to fail to fail to act when when we know that something really wrong is being done in our name that is that is as bad as doing it ourselves have you ever seen the interview there's an interview that's out there of one of the guys that say uh he was a drone pilot and he was responsible for i don't know a large number of deaths but he would describe what it was like to to be a drone pilot and what it's like to you know to to operate these death machines and fly through the sky and just launch rockets and how crazy it was and this this is a new thing that didn't exist decades ago didn't exist during the

first gulf war there was no drones this is i mean. This idea of precision attacks by automated machines that fly around the air and launch hellfire missiles. I mean, what a fucking crazy name. They call them hellfire. And it becomes like a computer game. You're looking at it on a screen. Completely detached.

Completely detached from the mass murder that you are in fact inflicting. What a dark world. Dark. We live in a dark time and the only thing is that there is this light which is growing. There is the capacity for love. Human beings, we are capable of love. It involves detaching ourselves from controlling orders and actually thinking as human beings, thinking for ourselves. Very difficult to do, but I think it's happening.

I also think that that conflict, the conflict of battling against the negative, builds up the positive in some strange way. I mean, the anti-war movement was really a big part of what made the hippie movement of the 60s. Like, that was a lot of it was in response to the vietnam war yeah there's this this war that people knew to be unjust and so this flower power love power movement lsd and marijuana and all that came out of that yeah that very resistance to killing people that didn't do anything bad to us produced this very positive thing but then of course there was a then a counter reaction to that which we call the war on drugs killing people that didn't do anything bad to us. Produced this very positive thing. But then, of course, there was then a counter-reaction to that,

which we call the war on drugs, you know, which slapped down on that and shut it all down again. I mean, I know you're not big into supernatural issues, but, you know, when I look at all of this, I have to say the Gnostics who, you know, if I simplify the Gnostic ideas, we know about Gnostic ideas because a batch of texts were found buried at a place called Nakamadi in Upper Egypt near the Temple of Dendera in Upper Egypt, and they've been buried for 1,600 years.

And they were found in 1945, and they contain a complete corpus of ideas of a people who call themselves the Gnostics. And they see a dark force at work in the universe, which is seeking to snuff out the divine spark in humanity. And it's a supernatural force. And what they say is that the entity who we've been taught for the last 2 000 plus years to believe is god the entity the abra the god of abraham who may be called yahweh or who may be called allah that that from the gnostic point of view that's not a god at all that's a that's a demon that's a lower level supernatural who's got this huge inflated ego who wants to be praised and worshipped, who's constantly urging his followers on to acts of violence and war.

And I think it's – we cannot say there are any facts in this area. Maybe it's just the dark side of the human psyche and maybe it's all generated by our brains or maybe there is a supernatural realm but I think it's I think it's a I think Gnosticism is a very useful tool to look at the society we live in today they believe that there were entities called archons who are evil angels who disguise themselves as human beings and mingle with us to drive us into all manner of crimes and and behavior that is hostile to the nature of the soul and that's what I see happening everywhere. But they believed fundamentally we are good and that we have

this light within us and that the way to reveal that light is through knowledge. That's why the serpent in the Garden of Eden is the good guy in the Gnostic frame of reference. Well, that's very bizarre, the serpent being the good guy. He's the good guy because he's saying to Adam and Eve, you have to know the difference between good and evil. You can't just be these thoughtless meat creatures, you know, who are wandering around in a happy days in the garden. If you're going to grow and develop, you have to make choices between good and evil. And it's the tree of knowledge of good and evil that the serpent introduces Adam and Eve to and says you need to

eat from that and if and and and and actually I would say this is true you we do need to we are defined by our choices it's through our choices that we grow and if we're ignorant of the context how can we hope to grow yeah and these I mean the stories of like Adam and Eve and the I mean all that stuff it's it's allegorical right I mean it mean, it's supposed to be, there's an allegory to. There's certainly an allegory. There's certainly an allegory there. It's not a real serpent, you know. It's not a real apple.

I don't read it as a real serpent or a real apple. I mean, actually, for the Gnostics, very clearly and definitely, it was a psychedelic mushroom. When the Gnostics portray the tree of life in the garden, the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden it is Amanita muscaria it's the fly agaric it is it is sometimes it's a psilocybe it is it is a visionary substance which they are which they are depicting and that that in a way from the Gnostic point of view is a necessary part of the liberation of the spirit that we that it's an agent for awakening. That's what the serpent was giving.

Now, I know that all the fundamentalist Christians out there are going to say Hancock is a devil worshiper because he's saying that the serpent is the good guy. But that's what the Gnostics said, and there was a deep and ancient study of the mystery of life and the mystery of reality. I've read somewhere, I don't remember the source, but I read somewhere where they were talking about the interpretations of ancient languages and the translations from ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, all to Greek, Latin,

that a lot of things got lost along the way in the confusion. And that one of the confusions was that the word apple could be interpreted also as red, and that it wasn't an apple, but that it was a red, and that red being the color of the Amanita muscaria. That was why. Absolutely. I mean, folks have to understand if they've never tried to pay attention

to how people translate ancient languages and then try to translate them several times, translate ancient languages and then try to translate them several times not just into you know from ancient hebrew to latin but also from latin to greek from greek to english to this there's so much that gets weirded out along the way like if you've ever taken a phrase from like a russian uh website where you don't know what they're saying and then put it into like google translate and you see the english version of what they're saying like then put it into like Google Translate and you see the English version of what they're saying, like, oh my God, it's so convoluted and confusing because of the way the structure of their language is very different, the grammar that they use is very different. Yes, that's right.

And that it's nothing in comparison to how different it was in ancient times. Yeah, a lot get lost in translation and a lot the translator imposes his or her idea of how things should be on the material. And many of the texts that come down to us are highly edited artifacts, which are actually representing a particular point of view. That's why these hidden Gnostic texts, which just lay buried for 1,600 years until they were found in the 1940s, are extremely interesting. And actually, we don't need to rely on translations there there were most of the Gnostics were wiped out by

Christianity when Christianity pulled on the jackboot of Rome and became the state religion of the most powerful militaristic Empire of the ancient world it set about destroying all competitors and amongst those it destroyed were the Gnostics but so and they were bent at the stake from a very early date but some Gnostic sects survived and they have left us images and there are a number of Gnostic churches these guys saw themselves as Christians there are a number of Gnostic churches where they painted the tree of knowledge of good and evil quite specifically as a money to Muscariot and um even in french frescoes what is that fresco from

like uh it was i don't remember the year but uh it was an adam and eve portrayal that showed several different types of mushrooms several different types of mushrooms i know the one and it's adam and eve clearly standing absolutely and it makes you wonder like this was in not modern times but not 5 000 years no this was like 1200 a.d it was like say 800 years ago something something like that we were at the tail end of the the last surviving gnostic sects the the cathars in the southwest of france are an example of a gnostic uh sect who survived through until the Catholic Church wiped them out with the so-called Albigensian Crusades, a truly horrendous act of ethnic murder that took place in the 1200s. So we're actually not that long ago, and things have survived from that time. And it's very

interesting that they are clearly indicating that the psychedelic experience is of crucial importance, that it's a liberating experience, that it allows us to wake up to the true nature of things. Now, of course, they would do it right. They would do it in a sacred context. They would work very hard on the setting to create the place and the space where this experience unfolded, because that's part of the experience. The substance on its own is only part of the story, as anybody who's worked with psychedelics knows. The context in which the experience unfolds is at least as important, and the intent with which you go into it. And what we're seeing now, again, history has been

obscured from us, but recent research is showing, for example, the famous Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece. 2,000 years at the Temple of Eleusis, pilgrims came from all over Greece once a year to undergo an experience, and that experience involved drinking a brew. We can now say with absolute certainty that that was a brew closely, that there were elements in it closely related to LSD. How do we know that with absolute certainty? Because the work has been done by Hoffman, by Gordon Wasson, and others. There's a very detailed study of what was in that brew. It was called the kykeon.

And growing on the barley that was used in the brew was a form of ergot, which contained Lsda mines and which was soluble in water they've really done the science in great in great depth and when you read the accounts you know of great figures from the ancient world people like Plato or Socrates who went and had the experience at the early Sinian mysteries they drink this they enter a darkened series of corridors and passageways and chambers in this huge in this huge temple and this light appears and they start seeing visions.

It's pretty obvious what's going on. Yeah, pretty obvious that they were tripping in some way, shape, or form. And they saw it as nurturing. They saw it as nurturing. They felt that there were several of the ancients who had this experience and who said that after having had this experience, they lost their fear of death, that they understood that it was not the end. Now we could argue about that, but that was the experience that they had. Yeah, that's the experience that a lot of people have when they take acid. One of the things that Larry Hagman said, who is a popular American actor, he did this

interview when he was on CNN, and they were talking to him about death, and he said that LSD completely took away his fear of death. It didn't mean what it meant before. Because you realize you're part of something larger. You're part of something. It is important to have a sense of self because it's important to brush your teeth. It's important to pay attention when you're driving yeah it's important to take care of your health while you're alive or you'll suffer some ill consequences but it's also important to recognize that a lot of your

need to take care of yourself can be can overwhelm your greater perspective the greater perspective of being a part of everything yeah and that it's not just about you and the worst cases of of human beings are the the egos run amok like the dictator like the saddam hussein or the anyone who control it's all them yeah it's all about them and huge insane yes and they cut people down and smash you destroy and kill and leave horrible, horrible lives in the wake of their ridiculous detachment from these universal ideas. We are a part of a giant collective consciousness. And it's almost impossible to get to that without something. It's almost impossible to get to that without something, whether it's yoga, whether it's DMT, whether it's something that you ingest that gets you to that understanding.

That understanding is very difficult to realize with our normal conditioning, the normal alpha male primate behavior that we have. What I call the problem-solving state of consciousness. That state of consciousness is not our friend when it comes to understanding our place in the wider scheme of things. It is our friend in many ways, and it's a good state of consciousness. But there are so many other states of consciousness that are of value and that need to be sought out. Now, some people are very lucky, and they can get into deeply altered states of consciousness and see reality in a different way without needing to take any substance. It's fine, you know.

Or they can get there through meditation or they can get there through floating in a flotation tank. But for a lot of people, a very powerful vehicle for changing our perspective on the nature of reality has been for thousands of years the psychedelic experience and it's time that we rehabilitated that and and gave it a place in our society well i think as you were talking about earlier that this is a time of great change i think this is a time of great awakening when it comes to psychedelics i was listening to this guy sturgill simpson i tweeted it today he's just a country music singer who sings about DMT. Oh, really? I haven't come across it. I mean, it's country music, like old school

Waylon Jennings style country music. If you're into that, and I am, I like that kind of old music. I've been really into that over the last couple of years. I've always been a Johnny Cash fan. I've always liked Dwight Yoakam and some country singers, but I've gotten into a bunch of other stuff recently. This guy, Sturgill Simpson,

it's like a big part of what he's singing about is psychedelics. Yes. And in a country song. Yes. Incredible stuff. Yeah. And I think that that, to me,

just sort of highlights that this is spreading through a bunch of different genres, different art forms. You see a lot of psychedelic art now. Not just Alex Gray, who's the master, but you see others that are coming along. a lot of psychedelic art now, not just Alex Gray, who's the master, but you see others that are coming along, a lot of psychedelic artwork.

I see it all the time when I go and speak at events, at conferences. People come to me with their art, and I'm seeing this huge explosion of visionary creativity taking place, and I'm constantly meeting people whose lives have been transformed uh by by these experiences and i think a lot of people are getting informed by guys like you who have written books on these experiences from supernatural to your own discussions including the one that got

banned from ted you know but the whole ted thing has kind of been exposed as being this really bizarre almost cultish yeah thing that's done a lot of great good yeah i mean they've i'm a big fan of a lot of the speakers some great stuff on that have come on ted but i had eddie huang on the show where he talked about his experience in ted where they kicked him out because he left there to do my podcast right they wanted him to be a part of this whole thing all day where you had to hang out he had to stay in a hotel room with someone else like they made him he's like can i get my own hotel room there no the ted experience you have to shack up with some fucking random dude who's talking about physics or whatever it is you know we want everybody to

be together it's very cult like a cult yeah it's like scientology well it's also become intensely profitable yeah and when things become intensely profitable and they become this giant business, that's part of why your talk got banned from TED instead of having an open discourse about agreeing or disagreeing about what you're saying. There's nothing wrong with that. But your talk got banned because of pressure from a bunch of people that would say, they start using the word pseudoscience. Pcience stop the pseudoscience yeah there's almost a cult of people that are afraid of debating ideas that are very controversial and very difficult to nail down especially when

you're talking about the emergence of consciousness in early man yeah okay no one knows how the fuck people got from hunting things to drawing on cave walls to experiencing visionary uh psychedelic states but we do know that happened it happened it happened and it's worth talking about and yeah we're not it's not like 1940 whatever the fuck it was when people figured out ayahuasca whatever year it was what year it was oh ayahuasca goes back a very long way no but i mean uh western world when they when mckenna talked about how they they first when they found harming they wanted to call it um telepathy yeah telepathy that's right but they realized that it had already been it had been scientifically defined as harming yeah so that was like what year was that that would probably be in 1930s somewhere and then wasson gordon wasson was in like the 50s 50s goes down to mexico right encounters maria

sabina has a mushroom experience and that's the beginning of the mushroom story in the west actually so that's like modern western culture and civilization This is our introduction to it. But the shit had been going on for thousands of years. Thousands of years. Thousands and thousands of years. So for us to assume that these, especially you and I, who have had these psychedelic experiences, I've never had an ayahuasca experience,

but I've had a dozen DMT trips and mushroom trips. There's something there. There's something there that's unbelievably intense, and to deny that that had an effect on consciousness of emerging people, it's ridiculous. That's, in my opinion, very anti-scientific. It's extremely anti-scientific. It is like the modern Inquisition. But it's a weird thing where people are ignoring that aspect and concentrating on all the other potential aspects, which I think probably worked in some sort of a symbiotic fashion. The introduction of meat into the diet, the experimenting with different food sources because of the changing of the climate.

There was a lot of factors that came into play that made lower hominids human beings. A lot of evolutionary factors, a lot of environmental factors, a lot of experimental factors. A lot of things happened where there was some benefits to certain types of behavior, and those people survived. And then things evolved and changed, and then, boom, we have Graham Hancock here in 2014 sitting in front of his Apple laptop. You know what I'm saying? I mean, there was a lot of things had to take place. A lot. It was a very complicated process, but I'm absolutely sure that psychedelics were a key part of it. Everyone who's taken psychedelics is pretty sure that it was a key part. You know why?

Because you've had the experience. You've had the experience. And everyone who doesn't, if you haven't had a psychedelic experience, and you're talking about psychedelic experiences being not a factor or non-effective you're crazy yeah you'd be better to shut up well it's just nonsense because they haven't people who've not had the had the experience at all are just they don't even in my view need to come to the table because they've got nothing to bring to the discussion i don't mind if they come to the table but i find their arguments to be almost hilarious yeah it's like i i have a very good friend who's a very intelligent guy

and he's never taken any drugs. And his take on it is, and he's a brilliant guy, I love talking to him, but his take on it is simply all the work's been done. There's no, I'm not going to learn anything new from that. Yeah.

And I'm like, well, that's so crazy. Yeah. I'll just say his name, Pendulet. Right. I love that guy. Well, it was the same. But he doesn't do any drugs, he doesn't do anything. Right, and he feels that there's no need for him

to have that experience. He said it's all been figured out, all the work's been done. I'm like, oh god, dude. Let me get you high on DMT. It lasts 15 minutes, and you tell me what work's been done. See, that's what's so, I think what's so special about DMT in particular, is that there is no negotiation

with the experience. There are very few people who can resist it once you hit the hit the threshold dose. And it's going to take you where it takes you and then you are confronted by one of the most intense and extraordinary experiences that it is possible for any human being to have. Yes, we can jump out of an airplane at 10,000 feet. Yes, we can scale a sheer cliff. That's also very intense and very, very extraordinary. Yes, we can go scuba diving to the depths. But if we look at the whole range of human experiences and say,

what is one of the most intense and potentially most transformative experiences that's possible to have, I would say DMT, done with the right intention and the right context, is right up there with anything else yeah anything else it's the most intense thing i've ever experienced me too i mean i've experienced everything obviously i've never been scuba diving i've never been skydiving and it doesn't mean that those things aren't intense as well but to deny the impact of those things it seems silly and the the people that are arguing against the efficacy of these experiences or against the influence of these experiences, to have those people actually have never had taken these experiences, arguing against them, it seems so silly.

It's crazy. It's crazy that they're listening. People are scared of them, though. But it's those people who are running the rules in our society still. Yeah. Well, if they weren't, that who are running the rules in our society still yeah well if they if they weren't that would be really terrifying if our society was run in the way it is now by a bunch of people doing dmt you'd be like what the fuck yeah but that that's one thing we can be quite sure if our society was run by a bunch of people doing dmt it wouldn't be run in the way that it's run no it wouldn't well you know mckenna found out about dmt by a friend who

is a scientist who worked at the Army Research Lab. And they had like a barrel of the stuff. They had a fucking barrel of DMT. And if anyone, if you've, DMT is, it's very small doses that are transformative. These tiny little doses that you smoke take you into these incredible realms. So the idea of a barrel. Yes. Or LSD. I mean, McKenna described LSD in the best way I've ever heard is that the amount of LSD you need for it to be effective is like an ant

that can break down the Empire State Building in 30 minutes. Yeah, like it's literally that little. He was a great genius. And it's, it's very fortunate again we have the internet and terence mckenna is has passed in the year 2000 he's still he's still with us and his and he is having this liberating effect on on people all around the world and he had the gift he had the gift of language yeah he spoke in a such a compelling way i love listening to terence i do too bill hicks you know the two of them together. Sure. Just amazing.

And Hicks was a huge fan of McKenna and became, I found out about McKenna because of Hicks. Right. Because there was a joke where Hicks said something about

leaving mushrooms under the table of all these people. Like, take it. And he said what Terrence McKenna would describe as a heroic dose and i remember

saying who the fuck is terence mckenna and so then i i don't it wasn't even a google back then i searched terence mckenna because of hearing about it on bill hicks right and then i got a hold of some of the um the audio recordings and then you listen to the guy's voice and it's like wow what a weird guy like a weird, interesting, compelling way of communicating. Incredible use of language, which just makes you think all the time. That's the service he's providing for all of us still. Yeah, I mean, he missed the mark on that December 21st, 2012 thing, but everybody did. Sure he did.

Everybody's got to miss the mark on it. Well, he was also a guy who used to get high a lot and come up with cool theories and things to think about and when you're postulating and thinking about the future here's the thing about thinking about the future no one's ever got it right no no one's ever figured out the future it's not a single fucking person has ever sat down anybody to get it right nobody got it right the future is the future is indeterminate yeah it's interesting i mean talking about psychedelics, what's happening with cannabis in the United States right now

is very interesting to me, coming from Britain where nobody is ever even willing to contemplate the legalization or the de-restriction of cannabis. But in America, state by state, people are voting with their feet, and the barriers are being broken down. I mean, America has been the huge dark force behind the war on drugs all over the world for the last 40 or 50 years. So many countries around the world have just blindly followed the American lead. That's the American government. That's the American power structure. But the American people are saying no. The American people are saying, actually, we want to smoke cannabis,

and we find it positive and nurturing for us. And state by state, either it's being decriminalized, or medical marijuana is available, or it's actually being legalized in a number of cases. This is a big change. Again, there's all kinds of conspiracy theories, like how Monsanto is going to take it over, and on and so forth but i see it as a really good thing that these barriers in the heartland of the war of drugs are being broken down by the american

people themselves and i say kudos to the american people for getting on and making that happen because it's going to be a benefit to the whole world yeah warren buffett is starting to get into the marijuana trade oh yeah that's when things are going to get freaky. Because when you've got a guy who's worth $90 billion or whatever the hell he's worth, that's when things can get very interesting. Well, sure. I mean, people are going to make commercial

advantage of this. But at the end of the day, I just come back to this is something that I've said again and again as the years have gone by. For me, the fundamental issue is the right of the adult to make sovereign decisions about their own consciousness. And one of those sovereign decisions has to be the right to use cannabis or not to use it. But one must be free to make that decision and not controlled by society. And once that is recognized, once all the scare stories about cannabis go away and we find that in fact state by state it's a positive rather than a harmful thing, I think that the question marks are going to begin to arise over the psychedelics too.

And we're going to see all those barriers breaking down in the years to come. Yeah, I think you're right. down in the years to come. Yeah, I think you're right. I think bringing up Warren Buffett and Warren Buffett's company specifically, what's happening is he's a part of this company. He's a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, has this company called Cubic Designs, and they sell, they maximize usable floor space in warehouses. And they sent 1,000 flyers to weed dispensaries in recent weeks. And these flyers, they show these medical marijuana grow-ups,

and it's like double your usable growing space. This is intense stuff because it's companies that are real estate holders that have giant amounts of money invested in companies that are real estate holders that have giant amounts of money invested in this that are saying, you know what? We're going to dip our feet into this growing marijuana industry. Exactly. I have a friend who works at a dispensary in Colorado, and the dispensary is five acres indoor.

Wow. Five acres. That's great. Five acres. That's an enormous building. Yes. And it's all pot. Wow. Five acres. That's great. Five acres. That's an enormous building. Yes. And it's all pot. It's just millions of dollars in marijuana. And there's people that are there. This has only been less than a year. I mean, it was made legal last January. And here we are, we're talking right now. It is September of 2014. This is a crazy thing. i just did my comedy special in denver and i hadn't been to

denver in a while the place has changed man it's like marijuana is a huge part of the culture now people are moving there's marijuana tourism people are moving there for marijuana they're moving there to be a part of the marijuana business because you can get really fucking rich right now because there's a lot of people that are not sure what's going to happen federally, because it's still illegal, federally. So they're not sure whether or not they want to dive into it yet. But the people that are bold, that are diving in, they're making insane profits. They've got a chance of making a great fortune from it. And the government is making a lot of money, too.

39% of the profits go to taxes. Wow. So every marijuana joint that gets sold, if it's sold for $1.39, no one's selling it for $1, but if it's sold for $100, $39 is going to the government. So they're making over $100 million this year in taxes,

just in Colorado. Yeah. State government. Yes. And so they're looking at this. So the federal government is not reaping the revenues because it's... No, because it's illegal. It's illegal. But they're finally allowing this so far the federal government is not reaping the revenues because it's no because it's illegal it's illegal but they're finally allowing the people to put their money in banks yes which was uh for a long time they had to do this weird shit

where they had to like put it in safe deposit boxes or they had to buy take the cash and then use it to buy bank notes and like buy you know bank checks it's very strange yes they weren't allowing them to use credit cards or any of the normal ways that people do business that keep them from being robbed at gunpoint by criminals, untrackable bills. So they had these kids that were driving around with stacks of cash.

It was really dangerous and scary. Very dangerous and scary. But it's very good that all of this is changing. I can only see it as a good thing. I don see any i don't see any downside in it it's a really it's a really positive development that's taking that's taking place i agree and i think it's also a part of this whole movement that you and i were talking about where the world is just changing yeah information is out there people are just not prepared to put up with that fucking shit any longer yeah they're not prepared to put up with it to be told with it, to be told what to think,

to be told what to do with their own consciousness. And it's great that it's Americans who are leading the way in this and the rest of the world is watching. And all the lies we've been told about cannabis, they're going to just drift away and be wrecked and destroyed forever

by what's happening in America. So it's a great service that's being done to the world. As you know, I had my own long-term relationship with cannabis. I smoked cannabis for 24 years. I overindulged. I undoubtedly abused my relationship with cannabis. I don't blame the cannabis for that. It was me.

I was just... You got crazy. I was crazy. You got a little crazy. I mean, it's very crazy to smoke it from 9 in the morning until 2 o'clock the next morning, seven days a week, or rather vaporize it as I did. And I reached a point, thanks to a series of ayahuasca journeys, in October 2011, where I made the decision that I wouldn't smoke cannabis.

Now, it's three years have come since then, but I want to live in a society where I and fellow adults are free to choose either to use cannabis or not to use it without any state agent sticking their nose in our private business this is this is our private business what we do with our own consciousness yeah and and it's incredibly encouraging to see that the Americans are taking that power back and showing the rest of the world how to do it. And also, anti-pot doctors are being exposed. It's really fascinating, all these doctors that are paid off by pharmaceutical companies. There was an article recently about anti-pot doctors being paid off, and all of the leading like anti-pot doctors all of them are taking

big pharma's money oh yeah all of them why am i not surprised well it's interesting that guys like sanjay gupta who used to do that who used to be on board with that now has stepped up yeah come out in a huge way and he's also starting to address psychedelics yeah starting to address what's going on with psilocybin and the new study that's shown these people that took psilocybin and quit smoking six months later 80 of them some some large number 70 or 80 percent quit smoking yes and didn't go back to it yeah because of just the the the clarity of those visions where you kind of understand like what am i doing oh i really get that perspective on your on yourself here and that's that's the that's the big news, you know, that these things are positive and beneficial. And the way forward for society is to create a positive social environment and positive spaces in which we can explore these experiences.

And the result for society as a whole will be very positive. Very positive. I'm convinced of that. Yeah, vice.com is the the guys who broke the story uh it's it's it's incredible and it's all these different doctors uh that have like here's one dr herbert keibler of uh kleber kleber of columbia university he's been um impeccable academic credentials has been quoted in the press and academic publications warning against the use of marijuana which he stresses may cause

wide-ranging addiction that's my favorite wide-ranging addiction and public health issues when he's writing his anti-pot opinion pieces for cbs cbs news are being quoted by nbr and cnbc what's left unsaid is that Clever has served as a paid consultant to leading prescription drug companies, including Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, Reckitt Bankheiser, the producer of painkiller called Neurofin, and Alkermes, the producer of a powerful new opiate called Z-O-H-Y-D-R-O. How do you say that?

Zohydro? Zohydro, I guess. He's a cunt. This guy's a professional cunt. He's a cunt. And what you say is, what he's been hiding and covering up is that all this stuff he's pushing, that's the real addictive drugs. Well, Pankow is called 16,000 deaths a a year it's a multi-billion dollar business absolutely it causes 16 deaths a year just in this this country 16 000 16 000 deaths a year stunning yeah 16 000

and uh doctors are on the take to keep promoting that and to stop us exercising our free choice as adults to manage our pain in other ways for example with cannabis and even if it did it was just 16 deaths i'm obviously i agree 16,000 if it was 16 deaths that's 16 more than cannabis cannabis is causing zero cannabis doesn't kill anybody that's what's the most ridiculous thing ever like you could die from aspirin a lot of people die every year from aspirin a lot of people die every year from salt they eat too much salt and they die absolutely drink too much water, you die.

Now, we have a painkiller. I think you call it acetaminophen here in America. We call it paracetamol in England. It really fucks your liver. Oh, yeah. It's a really, really

dangerous, dangerous thing. And once it reaches a certain level, there's no recovery from it. And it kills thousands and thousands of people a year. Well, I was reading this thing about bodybuilder

or watching a video, rather, about bodybuilding. And this guy was being interviewed who used was reading this thing about bodybuilder or watching a video rather about bodybuilding and this guy was uh being interviewed who used to be this uh big competitive bodybuilder and they're talking about all the drugs that you have to take to get so big but one of the things he was talking about was that what really kills these guys is not the steroids it's painkillers right they all get hooked on painkillers because they're in pain all the time because they're lifting all this crazy weight and up their body while they're doing it and they take acetaminophen all these different uh valiums percocets and that stuff just destroys their kidneys yes destroys their liver kidneys yeah it's it's and and the withdrawal symptom from stopping taking the painkiller is huge amount of

pain so you then go and take more more painkillers these are highly highly addictive highly highly dangerous drugs yeah and state sanctioned and government's totally sanctioned totally totally state sanctioned so i'm wondering now three years after i gave up cannabis whether you know whether you could dip back in dip my toes back in the water in a in a respectful way um not not do it every day have some sacred moments i value the sensual side of it i don't know i'm i'm i'm the next time i have an ayahuasca session i'm gonna i'm gonna ask uh ayahuasca that's gonna be my intent because it was ayahuasca that really interrupted my cannabis habit i'm gonna ask is there a way i can do this i don't know maybe that's weak of me i wonder this you know You know, I was talking with a friend last night

and he said there's a true addict speaking, you know, when I said this. Because it sounds a bit like that. But I did value cannabis. It was an extraordinarily positive thing for me in many, many ways. And what I feel is that I got out of balance with it. And if I could find that balance again

and use it rarely at special times, then I think it would be okay but I'm I'm I'm a little afraid to go back there well you should be afraid right you know because you've had personal experience with addiction and I think that addiction is purely mental it's purely mental it was very easy to stop once ayahuasca gave me the message and I really got that I had a severe kicking first of all a DMT trip then immediately afterwards five ayahuasca gave me the message and I really got that, I had a severe kicking. First of all, a DMT trip. Then immediately afterwards, five ayahuasca sessions. I was psychologically beaten up. And the message of that beating was you have to stop smoking cannabis.

And I did. And looking back on it, it's absurd. This is a very powerful plant agent. And here I am, you know, vaporizing it 16 hours a day, seven days a week. You went deep. I went deep. I went very deep. And it got to the point where I actually wasn't enjoying it anymore, where I just felt that I couldn't live my life without it.

But I discovered I easily could live my life without it. When I stopped, it wasn't a huge chore or problem to stop it wasn't actually difficult and in that sense i would definitely was not physically addicted to it right yeah that that's the thing is that i think there's some people that do get physically addicted i'm not you know i used to say marijuana is not addictive and i don't think it is with most people, but I think biological diversity, biodiversity in human beings is such that there's certain folks that have weird reactions to all kinds of different things. Cats.

Some people around cats. My friend Gary, he can't even come over to my house because I have two cats. If he walks in the door, he would start going, he would start wheezing. He can't breathe. He has to get out of there. You can kill him with a room two cats. If he walks in the door, he would start going, he would start wheezing. He can't breathe. He has to get out of there. You could kill him with a room of cats. But then I got my friend Joey Diaz, who has, what is he, 11? I think he has 11 cats.

This motherfucker has 11 cats. His house is a zoo. But if my friend Gary went over to my friend Joey's house, he would die. But Joey's having a party over there. He's got cats on his lap. He's petting them. They're sitting on his shoulders. So the's having a party over there. He's got cats on his lap. He's petting them. They're sitting on his shoulders. Yeah, so the message is we're all different.

And what works for one person doesn't work for another. And that's, again, why this issue of adult sovereignty, of us having the right to make our choices about our own bodies, is fundamental. And actually, with the psychedelics and the cannabis issue, that's just the tip of the iceberg of the whole issue of health and personal health and how our society is working to take away our choices over our personal health and to turn us into robots who consume the products that are pumped at us by the big pharmaceutical companies or who inventing every year this unholy alliance with psychiatrists, inventing every year new mental conditions for which new pills will be dosed out.

Yeah, in England, you guys don't have those commercials either. Those commercials are so fucking insidious. Ask your doctor about this drug that might cause you to shit yourself all day long and commit suicide. And commit suicide. That's the weirdest thing.

That's the big untold story about antidepressants. How many antidepressants cause people to kill themselves? How about antidepressants that supplement the antidepressant? Like there's a certain antidepressant, I forget what it was called, that had insane side effects that they were promoting as a supplement to your regular antidepressant. If your regular antidepressant isn't doing it, mix it up with this one. But this one could cause fucking kidney failure.

Your dick might fly across the room like a mockingbird. Anything could happen to you. But you might not be depressed or you might. I mean, fuck it. Just take our pills. Ask your doctor. These are the world's biggest drug dealers. These are the true mafia of drugs.

Well, it's also the idea of commercials. Commercials are influential. And the influence of commercials is very insidious. Because there's one thing if a commercial is influencing you to buy a particular vacuum cleaner. That doesn't bother me, man. This is the best. Hey, look. If you're too much of a knucklehead to go on Consumer Reports or to read reviews online

by independent people that tell you this vacuum cleaner is great, this vacuum cleaner sucks, if you're too much of a knucklehead to do that, I don't feel bad for you. Exactly. But when it comes to consciousness, when it comes to pills, especially when it comes to happiness, man, because that's the big one. Antidepressants, they should be called happy pills. I wrote an article a long time ago for my blog about happy pills. I called it happy pills.

And it was about this girl who was taking these antidepressants. And I think that the selling of happiness in pill form is the ultimate ridiculous American notion. It's horrible.

It's horrible. It's suggesting that the answer does not lie within, that it can be bought, that happiness can be bought. That's the ultimate illusion. Also, what's insidious about it is selling it on television like that does a huge disservice to the actual people

that could use antidepressants because they have a real mental imbalance. There's people that do do that. Sure. So, like, you're selling it as an antidote for a shit life. Yeah. Where there's other folks that might have a real issue. Yeah.

They have an imbalance. A huge chemical imbalance in the brain. And that can be adjusted in positive ways. Adjusted and make their life wonderful. Yeah. People that have a miserable life, they can make their life wonderful. Yeah. But instead, people will trivialize it because you see a commercial where a chick's running around a

field of wheat and spinning around with her baby and then someone says i want to live like that and then they call her fucking doctor next thing you know you're on a pill that you didn't need if you just start eating vegetables and going jogging every day you you'd be a way happier person than you were on that pill and again let, let me say outright that the psychedelics are very effective antidepressants. Yes. You know, psilocybin, being trial tested in human communities for thousands and thousands of years, ayahuasca in the Amazon, at least 4,000 years of use. And anybody who's worked with psilocybin or ayahuasca enough will know that they do

help with mood. They do help you take a more positive outlook on outlook on life and And whether that's to do with or altering the chemical balance in the brain because they they do work on the serotonin system in the brain Chemically yeah, or whether it's to do with the revelation that one has that you know life is an incredible gift and an incredible Joy and a privilege to be to be alive This is the this is what we forget we're immersed in the cares and woes of daily life constantly Life is an incredible gift and an incredible joy and a privilege to be alive. This is what we forget. We're immersed in the cares and woes of daily life, constantly struggling to pay the next bills, to get on in work, relentlessly driven to produce and consume. And we forget that it's a magical, enchanted, gorgeous, glorious universe that we live in, and we

have these amazing bodies, and we should just celebrate every minute of it. Psychedelics help with that, too. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to keep a balanced perspective, but I think it's also important to realize that perspective-shifting, consciousness-shifting experiences can also change the way you look at the world, and when you change the way you look at the world and when you change the way you look at the world it can adjust the way your brain functions yeah and it's not an either or situation it's a combinatory situation it's like they might affect your brain in a very chemical way but also

just the altering of a perspective could enhance your mood and it could enhance the way your body and brain function yeah because the the mind is what we are. We are our minds. The mind is the most powerful thing. And that's where all healing, I believe, resides. It resides in the mind. If you can kick in the body's ability to heal itself through right mental attitude, no medicine will do that for you. And that's why placebos actually work.

That's why they work better than the prescription drugs that they're being tested against. Well, most of the time they don't work better than the prescription drugs, but occasionally they do work. They do. Just the fact that they work at all. The placebo effect is not nearly as effective as medicine in most cases. But just the fact that it does work at all, that there's a way that you can tell your body to make itself better. And the way is by tricking it to thinking it's taking medicine. Look, you're going to be better.

I'm going to be better. The alleviation of stress and anticipation of this horrible demise that you're in, this impending doom that you can't escape with a sugar pill. That's incredible. It's incredible. It says something about the mind. And it's something really worth looking at.

And that is enhanced in psychedelic experiences. The perspective enhancing aspects of that, I do believe can change your overall health. Change your overall consciousness, which can change your overall health. Yeah, there's a lot going on, man. And I think these conversations are super important for people that are

uninitiated and that haven't they don't understand what's the hoopla all about. Why is everybody – goddammit, that Rogan's going on about drugs again. I know. I have a constituency of my readers and people who follow me on Facebook who are constantly throwing that Hancock's a druggie and all of this at me. And I just feel this is a really important. It's a really important conversation to have and fundamentally get right down to the bottom of what it's about.

It's about this whole issue of us taking back power over ourselves. That's what it's really about. And it needs to be seen in that context to make decisions about our own lives, right or wrong, and to learn from our mistakes and to grow and develop as a result i think it's also super important that you discussed your relationship

with cannabis in an abusive way too that like there's a balance to be achieved yeah there's a balance to be achieved for all of us yes it's sort of a strange that's what that's what i've that's what i've learned in a way i i had to deny myself this wonderful sensual plant, which helped me to enjoy food and music and many other sensual pleasures. Sex, absolutely. For people who've never had sex on pot, you don't even know what you're talking about. You don't even know what Led Zeppelin sounds like. Exactly. It's a beautiful sensual ally.

And I've had to deny myself that sensual ally for the last three years because I abused it. Do you want to spark up a joint right now? Tell me if you want to. Do you want to dive in right now? Of course, Joe, you're like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Sure. You want, yes? You sure?

Why not? I don't want to force you into anything. You're not forcing me. It's an interesting experience. No, no, no, no, no. I'm going to go live on Joe Rogan. Is that bad? No, that's not bad.

No, that's not bad. That's not bad. That's the way to do it if you want to dive in. We'll go a little baby hit. A little baby hit. A little baby hit. Nothing crazy. It'll be my first baby hit in three years.

Yeah. Nothing crazy. Nobody has to get hurt here. Okay. You were showing some images from Lebanon to us before the podcast. What have you gotten into? Well, now by the time I smoke this little baby hit, I'll probably have forgotten. But so what I was getting into was this, this fella here.

That's some American shit too. That's not that crap you get in England. That's some American shit, too. That's not that crap you get in England. That's made by American scientists and botanists. They all drive muscle cars and they do steroids. Oh, that's so familiar. That's such a nice feeling. He's back. Are we seeing that on the screen?

Yeah. That is... You're going in for another baby hit. Look at you. Jesus Christ, Joe. Just a little more. Just a tiny... You're good. That's it. seeing that on the screen yeah that is um you're going in for another baby hit look at you jesus a little more just a little just a tiny they're good that's it stop right there right you need to get confused on the way back we will see so here it is lebanon this is the um this is what is called the stone of the pregnant woman whoa at balbeck and that's you on top of that and that is

me on top of that can we see that this on top of that. Can we see that? Unfortunately, this is a PowerPoint demonstration. Can we see it? But this little tiny dot up here on top of that, that's me in Lebanon. And is this a recent? In July, yes. I was there in July. People say that Lebanon is very dangerous

and that this place is right on the Syrian border, but I didn't see any danger there at all. I had a magical experience in Lebanon. It was great. It was exciting. It was joy. Well, for you, it must be incredible because that's a site of so many ancient, huge, monolithic structures that are unexplained as far as their construction methods. So the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek in Lebanon.

Temple of Jupiter? This is what they call it. There is undoubtedly a Roman temple there, okay? And that Roman temple dates from the known historical period, some 200, 300 years after Christ. It's the Roman temple of Jupiter. And it's very extraordinary. But it stands on these huge foundations. There's a group of stones called three stones called the Trilithion, which are each weighing 840 tons.

840 tons. 840 tons. What the fuck? And they are lifted to 20 feet above the ground and built into a wall. I've sat on top of one of those stones. I've been down underneath it and looked up at it. 840-ton stones. This is a gigantic achievement. Now, the Orthodox view is that the Romans did everything, that they built those foundations and they built the temple.

I think, and many researchers who've studied them in this field agree with me on this, that actually the Romans found a much more ancient site, which was just extraordinarily megalithic, gigantic stones, and they built their temple on top of it. And later historians have simply given the whole thing to the Romans without considering what was going on there. And part of the reason I think that is because of these stones that are still in the quarry, which I was trying to, I don't know if it showed up on the screen. I got it. You got it. I'm trying to show it just now.

These stones stood in the quarry, okay? Now, so what the historians say is that the Romans, okay, they found they could move the 840-ton stones. That's 1,680,000 pounds. For people who don't like the word ton. You got your calculator going, man? Yeah, I had to because it didn't make sense. I was trying to double it, but it's not double. No.

Like, it's two pounds. Like, 2,000 pounds for every ton. It's a fearsome number, whatever it is. That's what it is. It's just a fearsome number. It's extraordinary. 2,000 pounds for every ton. So I was going 2,000 for each.

What? 840 times 2,000? Yeah. Is that real? And then that's what it is. That's what it is. One million. So here's the thing.

Those are the 840-ton blocks in in the walls in the foundation of the temple then we go to the quarry and we find this humongous thing which weighs over 1 000 tons and there's another one on the other side of the road which weighs 1 200 tons 1 200 1 000 2 million 400000 pounds. Yeah. What the fuck? So here's the theory, okay? The Romans found they could move the 840-ton blocks, and they did. This is the Orthodox theory, and then they built their temple on top of it. But they found they couldn't move these 1,200-plus-ton blocks. And by the way, this one is completely separated from the bedrock out of which it's been caught,

they couldn't move them, so they left them in the quarry. I think that actually proves that the Romans didn't create the 840 ton megaliths, because if the Romans had known that these gigantic blocks, if they had cut the blocks, if they had cut them themselves which we must say they did if we are saying that the romans were responsible for these megaliths if the romans had cut these blocks themselves they knew they were there and the very first thing they would have used for the smaller blocks that they put into place in the temple of jupiter was these large blocks they would have sliced them up like a loaf of bread into smaller blocks and moved those over to the temples. The fact that these huge megaliths still stand

in the quarry suggests to me that they were buried when the Romans came to that site because otherwise it would have been the very first thing they would have used for quarrying smaller blocks. That they were buried and that the Romans found an existing prehistoric megalithic platform and on top of it they built their temple of jupiter that's fascinating theory um it's it seems like open to interpretation to me sure uh because yeah because you're looking at but well either you know regardless of why they built the one what is it one million jesus christ two million four000. It's freaky when you do it in pounds. That's insane. Yeah, when you do it in tons, it's abstract.

1,200 tons. Okay, what's that mean? You know, it's hard for my head. Well, let's consider an average vehicle, which might weigh... 4,000 pounds. So it's about 2 tons, right? Is that about the weight of an average vehicle? So 2 tons divide 1,000 by that.

So you're looking at 500 family-sized cars in a thousand ton block a thousand tons oh my god it's just imagining a two million pound rock and a bunch of dudes are moving it and we know that someone at some time in history they built that they moved those stones i mean those stones. I mean, it wasn't that one, right? It wasn't, it was, what was the first calculation that we had? What did we say it was? 640 tons? No, the eight, there's three blocks of 840 tons. 840. So a million. Joined so closely that you can't slip a sheet of paper between them. I mean, they've not

been just roughly levered into place. They've been set down with perfect precision. So someone did that. We know that. Someone did that. And there are plenty of people arguing that the Romans did it. I feel, along with other researchers who've approached this subject, I feel I want to look at alternative possibilities for what these megaliths are all about. And that's one of the things I've been doing for the last year is traveling around the world looking.

I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to do this. I would imagine. Just amazing, amazing archaeological sites. God. And one of the countries that I visited, and I want to really mention this, is Armenia, where I have seen incredible stone circles, just wonderful. Dwarf Stonehenge make us just stand in awe and look at the way that these huge megalithic stones in what is called the Karahunj Stone Circle,

they have certain holes drilled in them to align up with particular areas of the sky. And an Armenian archaeoastronomer from that kind of data believes that the place called Karahunge is not just two or three thousand years old as most historians believe but well over 12,000 years old. Why does he believe that? Because of the astronomical alignments that the positions of the stars in the sky change very slowly down the ages that the alignment to the solstices changes because there's a slow nod on the axis of the Earth, very, very slow, over tens of thousands of years, which means that if the sun rises at a certain point on the horizon on the

summer solstice today, in two or three or five thousand years' time, that point on the horizon will have changed. You wouldn't notice it in a lifetime. You wouldn't notice it in ten lifetimes. But if you stay long enough, you'll note that actually the sun isn't rising in the same place on the horizon anymore. When did we confirm? That's called the precession of the equinoxes, right? Well, actually, no, that's a second matter. That's a different wobble?

That's the changing tilt of the Earth's axis. Oh, so there's a wobble and a tilt. There's a wobble and there's a tilt, and then there's actually a tilt within the tilt. No way. Yeah, this is the view. But the effect is because the Earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars and which we observe the other celestial bodies such as the moon and the sun, the Earth is our viewing platform. If you change the orientation in space of that viewing platform, then the rising points of stars, the moon, the sun change, and the positions of the stars in the sky

change. Wow. And it becomes a kind of language. Once you understand this, it is universally available to us. The calculations can be done. We can do it. Anybody can buy computer software today, which will show you the ancient skies over any point on the Earth's surface at any time in the last 30,000 years.

That's amazing. Yeah. And what's involved in those computer simulations is simply calculations that had been done in previous centuries by astronomers. And we understand these processes. We can measure them and set them up. But there you have a regularity, a changing patterns in the sky. If you tie that into architecture on the ground,

then actually you have a way free of all language of dating, of actually speaking. You can use this universal language of the stars and architecture to make a statement to the future. You can say that this particular time was very important to me, to our culture. It mattered to us. It mattered to us so much that we've created this huge monument to freeze the skies over a particular point. I wonder why those particular constellations, if at all, were important to them. That's where things get really strange.

And if I wanted to play devil's advocate, I would say, well, these holes, they're pointing up towards the sky. There's a lot of fucking stars up there. Sure there are. How do we know? Like, just because they line up with this from 12 000 years ago it doesn't mean they weren't looking it's very it's very complicated so right what you want is multiple locks i mean take the pyramids of giza right um and here i cite the the work of my close friend and colleague

robert robert boval um in particular in his book the orion mystery you you take the three great pyramids of Giza and you look at the heavens overhead and you also look at the religious system of the ancient Egyptians. What was important to them? What did they believe? You pretty soon discover that stars were incredibly important to them. Stars cover the inside of the ceilings of all tombs, all the pharaoh's tombs, for example. Monuments are lined up to particular places on the horizon where a star, perhaps it's Sirius, whose counterpart amongst the gods was the goddess Isis. Perhaps it's Orion, whose counterpart amongst the gods was the god Osiris. This is the thing. You have a mythology that speaks of entities who are clearly stated to be connected to particular asterisms, particular constellations.

That's the first thing. Are the constellations that are being said to have a reflection upon the ground in architecture, were they significant to the culture concerned? Well, yes. Absolutely, the constellation of Orion was of enormous significance to the ancient Egyptians. was of enormous significance to the ancient Egyptians. Therefore, it has to be a matter of interest that the three pyramids on the ground are laid out in a pattern that is temptingly similar to the pattern of the three belt stars of the constellation of Orion. That's fascinating.

Temptingly similar, but there's something else. Then you have shafts which run through the body of the Great Pyramid. There's a place called the King's Chamber high up in the Great Pyramid. It has a shaft in its north and south wall, which are about eight inches high and eight inches wide. And those shafts cut all the way through the body of the pyramid, and they come out on the south and north sides of the pyramid. You can actually, and it's been done in the past,

you can drop a cannonball in at the outside entrance to those shafts, and that cannonball moments later will appear in the King's Chamber. The shafts are about 200 feet long. In the queen's chamber down below, there are also two shafts. These shafts do not exit on the outside of the pyramid, which creates a mystery of its own, of great interest, what is at the other end of those shafts. But they do have very definite alignments.

And what Robert was really the first to show, some archaeoastronomers were onto this as well in the case of some of the stars, but what Robert was really the first to show is that in 2500 BC, the epoch in which Egyptologists say the pyramids were built, all of those four shafts that shoot up out of the King's Chamber and the Queen's Chamber, all targeted very significant stars in the sky at that time. Like, for example, the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber targeted the star Sirius at exactly the moment that the star crosses the meridian.

That's the north-south line that divides the sky above our heads. At exactly the moment that the star crosses that line, the shaft targets it, and you could fire a laser beam up and you'd hit that. In theory, you'd hit that you in theory you'd hit that star the alignment is that great so they're locking the pyramid in in the epoch of 2500 bc to four significant stars in the sky another one of those stars is the lowest star of the belt of orion that tells us that this is a dating mechanism of some kind and it can't be an accident that that's the case.

And once you understand precession, you understand that these alignments will change. So it therefore becomes very interesting to discover that the orientation of the pyramids on the ground, which Robert argues are the terrestrial reflection of the three stars of the belt of Orion, that the orientation of the pyramids on the ground, because of precession, shifts very slowly down the ages. And you can see this clearly on any good sky map program. As you go back in time, you find that the constellation of Orion,

at the moment it crosses the meridian, the same place that was targeting the star Sirius, at the moment it crosses the meridian, that the perfect alignment between the belt stars of Orion and the three great pyramids of Giza is not in 2500 BC, but in 10,500 BC, 8,000 years earlier. So we have a very interesting problem here. Either it's all coincidence, or the pyramids are monuments that speak both to the age of the ancient Egyptians, 2500 BC, and to a much earlier time.

Wasn't it also the same time where the Sphinx was pointing towards the constellation Leo? Well, that's again the third part of the lock. And Robert and I looked at this in depth together in our book called The Message of the Sphinx. And so we have the Giza Plateau. We have the three pyramids laid out on the ground in the pattern of the Belt of Orion in 10500 BC. That's looking south. Now let's look east let's look due east east of course it's where the sun rises but people who don't observe the sun don't realize that the sun

tracks back and forth along the horizon during the solar year it reaches its most northernmost point on the summer solstice 21st of june and its southernmost point on the winter solstice 20 21st of of december um on the equinox the day that night and day are of equal length the sun rises directly perfectly due east that's actually how you define an equinox because the sun is rising perfectly due east and looking at it is the sphinx aligned gazing directly, perfectly at the point of sunrise. Now we have to consider what's behind the sun then. What is the constellation of the zodiac that the sun is rising in? Because that's what the zodiac is.

It's a group of constellations that by chance the sun passes through during the course of the year. But the constellation that the sun rises against the background of is also affected by precession, the wobble on the axis of the earth, and that changes. You have roughly 2,160 years in each house of the zodiac. For the last 2,160 years, we've been in Pisces. As I often say, it's not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol.

Before that, it was the constellation of Aries, the ram. Rams were incredibly important in the years from 2000 down to the time of Christ. Just look at the biblical stories. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the Great Sphinx is a lion, admittedly with a human head, but that head is rather small, and we think that the head almost certainly was recarved in a later time. Probably the whole statue was originally a lion, crouching there on the horizon, gazing due east, at the rising sun on the equinox, and at the constellation behind the sun. And that constellation is, in 10,500 BC, the constellation of Leo.

As above, so below. Leo speaking to the Sphinx. Orion speaking to the pyramids, locking in to a date that is far before any civilization began. I know I'm on a long wrap here. But it's awesome. But just at that point, when the Egyptologists say, well, it's impossible for there to be anything like a civilization at Giza 12,500 years ago.

Just when they're very happy saying that, and they're telling us that no other monument can be found anywhere in the world, which is 12,500 years old on this scale, lo and behold, up pops Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. Göbekli Tepe in the area of Turkey that, by the way, was once historic Armenia. Göbekli Tepe pops up. It's dated by the German Archaeological Institute. They discover that this huge complex of stone circles has been deliberately buried 10,000 years ago. And the carbon dating, because you can't date stones,

you have to date organic materials. The carbon dating of organic materials found with those stone circles puts their age back to 12,000 years and more. For you, that must have been like Christmas. It was like Christmas. It was like Christmas. It was like a gift. I don't want to... I have to confess.

I mean, we all have egos. Of course. I have to confess that it was a nice moment for me when the New Scientist magazine in Britain, which years ago, back in the 90s, when I published Fingerprints of the Gods, was amongst the magazines that attacked my work as quote-unquote pseudoscientific. I don't know how my work can be pseudoscientific because I don't claim to be a scientist. I'm a fucking journalist, you know. I'm not a scientist.

How can I be a pseudoscientist? You're just a guy who's gotten obsessed with an idea. Kind of. A little bit. A little weed like in the session yeah so anyway new scientist magazine um back in the 1990s was saying that i was wrong where the basic message of fingerprints of the gods is history is much older and much more mysterious than we've been told so it was great in october 2013 when new scientist magazine came out with a headline saying history is much older and more mysterious than we've been told. So it was great in October 2013 when New Scientist magazine came out with a headline saying history is much older

and more mysterious than we thought. It's funny. And at the heart of that is... Graham Hancock was right. That's what the title should have been. In my next life.

We're sorry, dude. In my next life. We were fucking with you. But there was Gobekli Tepe and that's what changes everything. Yeah, that really does. And by the way, I'll just say,

I guess we may be running out of time, but I'll just say, are we good? I just say also Indonesia, which is the other place that my wife, Santa, and I have done a lot of research in the last six or seven months, has been found what was thought to be a 2,500-year-old site on top of a hill, 500-year-old site on top of a hill, a site made of blocks of columnar basalt, which forms naturally but which can be used as a construction medium. It's called Gunung Padang, and on the top of the hill in a series of terraces is a rather extraordinary monument thought to be about 2,500 years old, made of these blocks of columnar basalt. No really thorough research was ever

done by archaeologists. A little bit of trenching down to about half a meter in depth was done, and some carbon was brought up and dated. But really, the site, it was just kind of taken for granted that it was 2,500 years old. Along comes Danny Natawajija, who is a Caltech-trained PhD geologist working out of the city of Bandung in a government agency of the Indonesian government. In fact, he particularly focuses on earthquakes. Earthquakes are his thing. He comes along, and he's intrigued by Gunung Padang. First of all, that there's old traditions about it being a sacred place. It seemed to go back a very, very, very long way.

And he starts to look at it as a geologist. And what he realizes, suddenly it comes to him, he's not looking at a natural hill. He's looking at a pyramid, on top of which is this relatively recent monument. But somebody built a pyramid there. So he begins work on this. So it's covered in dirt. It looks like a hill, but it's inside. It's a man-made structure. That was Danny's intuition, but then he had to prove it. So he put together a team, and they did a huge amount of remote sensing work and some core drilling down to depths of about 15 meters into the top of the hill. And what they discovered was incredibly tempting. It supports Danny's intuition that we are looking at a man-made pyramid here.

made pyramid here, it produces dates that go back as much as 26,000 years, right into the last ice age. And the remote sensing equipment shows rather regular cavities inside the monument, which look like chambers of some kind. Well, naturally, Danny and his team were stopped working for quite a long while by the archaeological establishment in Indonesia, who said, we know that this structure is two and a half thousand years old, and there's no need for any further research on it, and it just disturbs the local villagers, and you know, go away. And so they lobbied and they had him stopped.

But Danny took it to the highest level. He got the support of the Indonesian government, and two and a half weeks ago, they started work excavating, thoroughly excavating Gunung Padang. Wow. And so far the results look very interesting. What if they get down to it and you see a building? Two and a half weeks ago, they started work excavating, thoroughly excavating Gunung Padang. Wow. And so far, the results look very interesting. What if they get down to it and you see a building, 26,000-year-old building? 26,000 years old.

And again, I can't summon up a map magically, but if I were to do so, consider Indonesia, which is a long string of islands today. today, but if you go back 12,500 years ago, that long string of islands is joined to a gigantic mainland, a huge ice age continent, because sea level is hundreds of feet lower. And therefore, Indonesia becomes actually quite a plausible place for some sort of hall of records, some sort of time capsule, because Gobekli Tepe is also a time capsule. That's so absolutely incredible. i can't say fascinating anymore because people starting giving me about it yeah last few podcasts i see

i i don't know when things are fascinating i can't come up with any it's you know me it's my way of going whoa there's interesting stuff happening happening in the world i've been beautiful i've been lucky to spend some time exploring this i am writing a sequel to my best known book undoubtedly is fingerprints of the gods gods the evidence for earth's lost civilization and what year was that 1995 1995 and now you know after being scorned and put down by the archaeological establishment there is enough new evidence out there for me to produce a whole other book yeah there's a whole other story to tell not an update of fingerprints of the gods but

in a new book, which looks at all of this information. How about what's going on in Stonehenge? These most recent monuments they discovered, much bigger than the rest of Stonehenge. Than the rest of Stonehenge. That's the thing, you see. That's why archaeologists need to be

a little more humble, because the next turn of the spade can change everything, completely alter the story, and we should always remain open to that. Yeah, a one discovery like that one farmer finding this stone and go back to tepe unearth this incredible structure that rewrites history and literally one turn of the spade that piece of stone is seen by american

archaeologists in the 1950s really and they ignored it decide not to look at it because it's so finally done that they think it belongs to the ott Ottoman period within the last four or five hundred years. Actually, it turns out to be 12,000 years old. What's good that they didn't fuck with it. They probably would have... Yeah, well, you know. It's cool that it happens this way. The German Archaeological Institute later, unfortunately, they've stuck a hideous roof over the top of Göbekli Tepe now.

They have? Oh, it's so... To try to keep it from decaying or something? Look, it was 19 years it was exposed to the sun. It was out there. It was being... They began the excavations in 1996, and it's fine, fine. And now that they've finished the excavations,

they decide that in that particular area, they're excavating other areas, they decide to stick this horrendous roof over it, which cuts out the light, makes it impossible to see the stone pillars. The roof is badly built, so there are platforms built inside it on which huge heaps of stones have been piled up. That's to keep the roof on if there's any high winds.

So suddenly, yes. So suddenly the possibility of any kind of magical experience at the world's most intriguing and mysterious ancient site is completely written off by this hideous piece of so-called protective architecture, which in my view is just the worst kind of vandalism. I'm really offended by it. I went back to, I was in Gobekli Tepe in 2013. I went back again this year and I was just horrified. It made me feel physically sick to see what had been done to it.

That's so bizarre. The desire to, is it because to sell tickets so people have to pay to get in there? Do they pay? I think it's a kind of... In this case, I think it's a kind of possession. This is ours. Really? We've seen it.

We the experts. We the authorities. Wow. That's so weird. We really get to form an opinion about it because we're going to damage its appearance so much in protecting it that it'll lose its essential mystery. Well, it just seems bizarre that they're trying to protect stone. That doesn't make any sense. It's like, imagine if someone decided to put a giant canopy over the Sphinx.

You'd be like, what are you talking about? It's been here forever, dummy. You see, and this is being done at archaeological sites around the world. It's been done at Menaidra and Hagarim in Malta, which have profound astronomical alignments. You stick a fucking great dome over the top of it. It's being done at Rosslyn Chapel in Edinburgh. We ruin everything! We ruin everything. The worst vandals are often the authorities, those who are in

control. Well, that Zawai Hawass guy is in the pokey now, right? No, he's not. Didn't they arrest him? He did, but all the charges were dropped. Oh, he came up with some shackles. Yeah. Situation.

He's a big front man for Egypt. Is he still running everything over there? No, he's not running everything, but he's got an official position in relation to the promotion of tourism. It's so bizarre when you see those guys so vehemently opposed to new information, which is essentially what the ideas being proposed are. There's new information. Yeah. There's certain pieces of new information that in my essentially what the ideas being proposed are. There's new information. There's certain pieces of new information that in my mind are just undeniable. The Robert Shock stuff. Sure.

I mean, I'm trying to. By the way, my first trip to Gobekli Tepe, Robert Shock and I traveled together. You guys made a video, right? There was some filming, yeah. Yeah. But we were at Gobekli Tepe in December. Sorry, not Gobekli Tepe, at Gunung Padang in Indonesia. Shok and I were there in December 2013, and then I went back again with…

What was his impression of it? His impression was very much that this is an intriguing site. He looked at the remote. You see, as a geologist, he can understand what remote scanning paperwork looks like, and he looked at what Danny's team had produced and said this is absolutely fascinating. It really deserves further research, and that's now what it's paperwork looks like. And he looked at what Danny's team had produced and said, this is absolutely fascinating. It really deserves further research. And that's now what it's getting, fortunately. Well, it's just amazing when they uncover these things.

Like, I love the ones they find in Mexico when they're, like, building something and then they stumble upon some ancient Aztec temple. Not many people who go to Chichen Itza and see the Temple of Kukulkan there, the Pyramid of Kukulkan, which is the famous monument of Chichen Itza, not many people realize that there's another pyramid inside it, which is inside it. There's a little door at the bottom of the northern stairway. And I don't think it can

be done now. The place has been so tightly controlled. I don't think people are even allowed to climb the pyramid of Kukulkan. When did they stop that? I believe that stopped in the last two or three years. I was there. No, it may be a little longer. The last time I was there was in 2010, and then it was stopped. Well, they say that they were seeing erosion by people's feet. I don't know.

I don't know. There may be all kinds of arguments, but the fact is it was possible to climb it. Yeah, I used to. I did it. Back in the 90s. Anyway, inside it is a whole second pyramid. The pyramid that we see has been built on top of an earlier one. And there's a passageway that leads up to the top of it.

And there's an altar. And there's a figure of a puma or a jaguar inside. It's a very spooky place. Wow. Yeah, that whole complex is so incredible. It's so amazing to think that. I know you scuba dive. Have you ever done those tunnels that they found?

In the cenotes? Yeah. No, I haven't. Those are terrifying. Yeah. These people scuba dive and they go, there's these Mayan tunnels that they had found that are underwater. So you have to, but the people that are treasure hunters have gone into these things and found these incredible artifacts. Yes.

But you got to be willing to swim underwater with scuba gear in a dark tunnel for a long time yes they're long like you can get a mile in yes that's that takes tremendous courage also takes also takes very special equipment um you know you're having to having to carry a lot more air with you and it would be a very complex mixture of gases. And sometimes they have narrow passages you have to squeeze through. One of the most... Cave diving is one of the most dangerous things. Fuck that, man.

You know, because... I'll tell you why. Because the entrance passage can be long and winding. There can be several alternative routes through it. And it's often heavily laden with silt, with sediment. If the diver is not very experienced or if the diver panics and starts thrashing around that silt silt gets thrown up into the water and completely fills the water so that you can't see your hand in front of your face and suddenly

you're a mile in a hundred feet deep and blind oh fuck that was one of the most legitimate freak outs i've ever had on a podcast right there you saying that yes me thinking that was just a tremendous freak out yeah just the idea of being knowing that it's you're going to run out of air before it settles too yes oh yes you're done for unless unless you can find your way let's buy some miracle you can find your way through that fog but the very first thing if you're going to do that that you have to do is you have to calm your mind you're freaking me out man yeah yeah well let's talk about my novels then well listen those people are just brave as fuck um it's just amazing and people are willing to do that yeah it's guts it's courage it's courage

my courage of the warrior in a way so um this, how many novels have you written now? So, I've written three. Is this the third? Well, I've written Entangled, which is a whole other story. Right. And then I've written volume one and volume two of War God. The first volume was War God, Knights of the Witch. It was published in 2013.

There was a big support and take up from your audience, which I'm extremely grateful for. I heard a lot of positive reviews, too. People enjoyed it. Thank you. And I made an offer at that time on your show where I said that if people wrote to me at a particular address, which is wargoddedications at gmail.com, and sent me their own address and showed me that they preordered the book, I would send them a signed, dedicated book plate. In other words, I would sign a label, I would dedicate it to them, I would send it to them.

Little did I know that nearly 5,000 people would ask for those signed, dedicated book plates. It became a massive labor of love for both myself and my wife, Santha. She's doing the enveloping, I'm dealing with the correspondence, signing the book plates, we're going to the post plates, we're going to the

post office, we're spending thousands of pounds on postage. But it was great. It was a fantastic thing. And it helped the book to get noticed because there was great skepticism about buying a second volume from my publishers unless the first volume worked. And the first volume worked enough for me to be commissioned to write volume two of War God, which is called War God Return of the Plumed Serpent. And that is published on the 9th of October. And I'm making the same special offer, very limited, to you.

But it's going to be a bit different. First off, if you go to my website, go to www.grahamhancock.com and go to the war god page it's very easy to get there right scroll down at the bottom of the page that shows the covers of all the editions and you will find a statement there and that is that if people write to me if people pre-order first of all they have to pre-order either order volume one or pre-order volume two amazon don't take your money until they actually send the book. And I've got the links to Amazon.com there. I will, when I finish my travels,

and I'm going to be on the road until the 27th of October, but during November, I will send out those book plates again. But what I can't do this time is I can't get into personal correspondence with people. It was very interesting. It was very touching and heartwarming thing that so many people wrote to me. And so many of them, I wanted to speak back to them. It's very cold, you know, to receive a letter and not to reply. So I did. But the problem this year is that I've got to write the sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods.

And I really need to start that during November because my research travels will be over at that point. I've got to write that and I can't spend two months or three months corresponding in detail. So my offer is write to me, show me that you've bought the book or pre-ordered volume two. And above all, please give me your postal address because you can't imagine how many times people write to me asking for the book plates and don't give me their postal address. Please give me your postal address. And when I get back from my travels, I will sign the book plates. I will send you a signed book plate, which is simply a label that you can stick inside your copy of the book. And that, if that results in a bit more uptake for War God 2, it'll be good for me because it's very difficult to start a sort of new career as

a novelist at the age of 64. But you seem to be really enjoying it. I love it. I love writing novels and I love getting, this is why I was talking about warriors earlier, I love getting into the spirit of the warrior. I don't know why, it's fascinating. It's just absolutely fascinating. What would drive a man like Cortez to take 490 men and face them against the might of the Aztec Empire? Hundreds of thousands of men under arms who will kill you in the most awful way if they catch you. What kind of will does it also to consider, because I'm interested in them, supernatural elements. Were they being misled by demonic forces in some way? That's something that I examine there. So I love doing it, but I'm known as a nonfiction author and that's mainly what I do. People buy nonfiction because they're interested in the subject very often. People buy a novelist because they trust that novelist and know that his next book will be good. And I need to build up that leadership. What is your fascination with demons?

What's your fascination with supernatural influences and the concept of demons? For a long time, I didn't believe in any spiritual element to life. I didn't see any of that at all. It was only really when I said, and this is where my critics will say, well, Hancock's gone nuts, you know. It was only really when I started drinking ayahuasca in 2003. I suppose for a decade before that, I'd been immersed in the ancient Egyptian texts. And the ancient Egyptians are all about the quest for immortal life. They're all about how you live this life to continue on as a spirit and ultimately to live the life of millions of years.

And they very clearly indicate that dark forces are at work in the universe which can mislead us as well as there are light and positive forces that we can choose to follow which will lead us into very nurturing and worthwhile and excellent directions. All those influences are there. So that's there in ancient Egypt. Then I start drinking ayahuasca in 2003 and I encounter seamlessly convincing parallel realms inhabited by intelligent beings, some of whom seem very dark and dangerous and some of whom are filled with light and joy and exercise the power of healing. Now, I absolutely accept that all of this could be a projection or a creation of my own mind, that there is no exterior reality to it whatsoever.

It's just that's all there is. But I don't think it's that way. I think that what happens in a deeply altered state of consciousness is that we retune the receiver wavelength of the brain and encounter other levels of reality that are normally closed off to our senses and the first thing i would say to any i know that a number of people who've worked with psychedelics in depth haven't come to that conclusion i know that but the conclusion that i come to might the little offering that i bring to the table and that many others have brought, is that there is a separate freestanding reality of some kind which we don't fully understand yet. And that in altered states of consciousness, we can encounter, interact with that reality. That's the view that I have.

Now, in that reality are spiritual forces, some of which seem to eat fear and energy and dark energy. They seem to thrive on anything that's miserable or wicked or cruel or thoughtless or vile about humanity. Entities that glow with light and love and that seek to show us how we may bring to light that divine spark within us to go back to the Gnostic idea. Those you encounter in a very direct way in the ayahuasca journey. Because unlike, you do encounter them in the DMT journey too. They're not quite the same. But unlike DMT, ayahuasca allows time for really processing and thinking through what you're experiencing. It's unfolding over four hours, not four or five minutes. And that, you know, that is a huge effect and it had a huge

effect on me. And I'm not adamant about this. I accept I could be fantasizing it all. It's interesting that other people encounter pretty much the same beings and the same sort of drive to do something better than they've done before. It's interesting that there's that transpersonal side of it. I choose to believe that there are freestanding parallel dimensions and that we are encountering them in altered states of consciousness and that therefore there's interesting scientific work to be done because in theory we could actually begin the targeted exploration of those dimensions uh by using volunteers and and psychedelics i choose to believe that that's what's going on i could be completely wrong it could just be the majesty of the human mind and we just invent all these worlds that's what i was going to ask you what's the most compelling argument against it like what's the most compelling article um argument rather from

like a neurological standpoint like has anybody ever explained to you like what's going on there isn't a compelling argument they don't know there isn't a compelling argument there's a reference frame and the reference frame and this is again where where i got myself into so much trouble with ted the reference frame is the reference frame of materialist science and that reference frame says that all consciousness is a kind of accidental epiphenomenon of brain activity. There's actually no reality to consciousness. That is not something that's been proven scientifically and experimentally. It is just the way that a large and influential group of scientists see the world, that everything can be reduced to material causes. So the changes in brain activity that accompany

visions, you can measure, you can observe those changes on an MRI scanner. Those changes in brain activity are the experience you're having according to this reference frame. Your experience can just be reduced to that and there's nothing else to it. But that's not a fact. That is a philosophical view about how reality works. We don't know for sure. It could easily be the other way around, that the brain activity is simply necessary in order for us to see something that was always there but that was normally closed off to our senses.

So the compelling argument as far as what's happening when you're having these extreme visual experiences, what is the argument? Has anybody ever tried to explain it? Is it just supposed to be some chemical reaction with your cerebral cortex? Well, that is the materialist reductionist view that it's just that and nothing more. But there's a whole other view on it. Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico, you're very familiar with his work because you presented the spirit molecule. Yes.

Rick Strassman does entertain the possibility that what is going on is not merely in and of our brains but does represent stable freestanding dimensions of reality. We have no facts in this but we have an incredibly intriguing area to inquire into you know yeah and it's it's also one of those things where i feel like when you've experienced it yourself you get a really better frame of reference as to why is this compelling at all because it sounds preposterous to someone who has no experience i know i know really does it's you know because and i'm gonna have loads of people saying hancock's a druggie of course yeah too late but the you know there's that thing that people, when you want to define certain aspects of whatever the psychedelic experience is, where they seem to be almost impossible to define for people who have actually experienced it. Yes.

The real problem is when someone who hasn an experience tries to define it. And it's like, man, you can come up with a bunch of really compelling arguments from a medical standpoint. It's like, what's the effect on the cerebral cortex? What's the effect on the visual aspects of your interpretation of this thing? It's because of this chemical interacting with that. That's all fascinating, amazing stuff. But the experience... But it's bad science. It's bad science to present it as fact when it isn't.

Many times, given this very simple analogy of the telescope, which I think explains the logical problem in the materialist view, if you want to look at a distant star with your telescope, you're going to point it at the right area of the sky, first of all, and then you're going to focus it. And as you focus it, physical changes will take place in the relationship between the lenses inside the barrel of the telescope yeah right okay eventually the star will come into view and you can see it clearly you'd be completely wrong to say that the star is the physical changes

inside the barrel of the telescope those physical changes have simply allowed you to see the star. Whoa, you just blew my fucking mind. And that's the same idea with DMT, that it's changing brain function to allow you to see something that you couldn't. It's refocusing the brain, in other words. Wow, that's very possible. Can't prove it, but it's an interesting inquiry.

I never thought about it that way, I don't think. Not entirely. And interesting experiments could be done to test that with human volunteers. You could begin to investigate. If there is a freestanding reality, then we ought to be able to get certain information out of it. There should be possibilities. Yeah, I always had just thought of it as a chemical gateway. But I think this is a way better way of explaining it.

The idea of a telescope having to focus in to see something. And then the chemicals focusing you in. That a chemical your own brain makes. Your own brain makes it. Focusing you in. And perhaps for some very good reason. Wow. That's amazing.

I never thought about it that way before. Yeah. But whatever it is, it's pretty fucking profound and for someone to comment on it that hasn't taken it seems kind of silly especially because it's only 15 minutes it's disrespectful to speak of it it's fine to speak of it but it's disrespectful

to put it down without having had the guts actually to have the experience yourself don't you think it's becoming more and more accepted though because I think for a long time academics resisted taking it or if they did take it, talking about it because they didn't want to be labeled. Because there's a lot of people that will label you if you talk about psychedelic drugs. Until very recently it's been considered a career ruining move, you know, for any

academic to speak positively of psychedelics. Even though they all knew the news, they all knew the positive side of this. But this is again again, gradually changing. And, again, I think the American role, the role of the American people in changing the legal status of cannabis state by state is also going to feed into this and allow us to have a more rational dialogue regarding psychedelics, which can be. Of course, I'm not saying to people, yeah, go out and take psychedelics. Of course, I'm not saying to people, go out and take psychedelics. What I'm saying is that these are very powerful agents and that they can be extremely healing used in the right way. And they can change our whole view of reality. Why should we be forbidden to explore that if as responsible adults we choose to do so?

Yeah, the argument is stupid. And I think the argument is eventually going away and i think it'll be replaced by a new argument and then the new argument is what the fuck is really happening yeah and you're that's it your question about it the or your uh proposal is a very fascinating one but whatever it is those things are there and you can benefit from them or not it's up to you but yeah it's the fact that we live in a world where those are illegal is crazy. It's bizarre. And if people are having very bad experiences from time to time with psychedelics, part

of the reason for that is the world we've created where these are illegal and where it's impossible for people to get good advice that they can trust and where there's this atmosphere of danger and threat that surrounds it. Take all that away and this very powerful instrument can be managed much more effectively. No doubt. And I equate it in a lot of ways, this idea of it being bad and negative. I equate it in a lot of ways to vaccinations. And here's why. There's this vaccination, this anti-vaccination movement in this country. A lot of people feel like vaccinations are unnecessary, and they may have some good arguments. They may have some good arguments, especially about certain vaccinations for things that are sexually transmitted diseases and things along those lines, like hepatitis shots and shit you're giving to little kids.

There's a real good argument against that. And there's definitely an argument that there's a lot of medication that kids are taking and is it the right amount yeah but there's no argument that vaccinations haven't saved a fuck ton of lives because they have they have they've they've stopped a lot of diseases dead in the tracks absolutely but they also much like we talked about some people are allergic to cats some people have very different biological reactions to all sorts of different chemicals. And there's going to be some adverse reactions to anything you put in your body. I absolutely agree that vaccination is an incredibly effective medical tool in many ways.

But there also is a kind of vaccination mafia at work because they're the ultimate mass medication. And people are making money out of this. There's no doubt. Whenever there's profits, there's fuckery. There's no getting around it. It's just the way human beings are. Fuckery, side by side. So, it's one of those scenarios,

very much like psychedelics, in a way that there are going to be some rare cases if we make psychedelics legal across the board. There's going to be some rare cases of a person in a bad state of mind or a bad mental makeup

or what have you, bad psychological makeup, you fill in the blanks, where they take it and it's detrimental to them. It's going to happen. And that'll be highly publicized and used as an argument to stop all of these freedoms. And Bill Hicks had the very best answer to that, as I'm sure you remember, you know, that the lunatic who leaps out of the window, imagine he can fly on LSD. Why didn't the fucker try and take off from the ground, you know?

Yeah, he goes, we lost a moron. The world got lighter. Exactly. The world got lighter is one of my favorite lines. Beautiful, beautiful. Yeah, but that's, that is, you know, it's just a strange argument to keep people from doing it because especially like this doctor that we're talking about earlier that's talking about cannabis and the addictive

properties of cannabis this isn't even talking to someone who was addicted to cannabis and you it's still it's a it's a silly i like there's a lot going on when someone's addicted yeah it's not all necessarily chemical and the ones that are chemical you're getting paid for so that doesn't even make any sense the ones that are chemical, you're getting paid for. So that doesn't even make any sense. The ones that chemically make you addicted is the ones you're getting money from. And that's why people are fed up with all of this shit. Because it's so corrupt and it's so wrong. And it's time that a new direction was taken.

And there are people who are on the wrong side of history on this. And there will be. But we are moving forward. I think we are as well. I think it's pretty cool to see too. But, you know, I think it's also important that a guy like you, who smoked pot from 9am to 2am

every day. 7 days a week. 365 days a year. Going to enormous lengths to be able to obtain it when I was traveling. How did you do that? Well, it's complicated. You have to have a network. You have to have a network. But, you know, it is I do know what I'm talking about.

I had a long relationship with it, and I understand how. How do you feel now, having dipped back in the water a little bit? I feel good, but I don't feel any urge to become, you know, another cannabis smoker again. I like my clarity. I was able to write with cannabis, but since I stopped smoking cannabis, I've been clear. My mind, there's been a clarity. There's a certain fog we're lifted. That fog wouldn't have been there if I'd had one joint at the weekend and that was all.

But since I was smoking all day long, that's why it was there. It's nice not to have that fog. I feel good about it. I feel more productive. I write on my novels. I can write 5,000 words a day. Sometimes I get so into the zone, so into the flow. All that is good, and I feel good about it.

And I feel probably in the long run my right choice would not to have a big relationship with cannabis. I think I've done that. I've been there. I've done that, and I've got the T-shirt. Yeah, for me it's a tool. I don't use the same tool every day. Sometimes I don't use any tools. I don't need it.

But it has a pretty profound effect in a lot of ways. Yes. You know one of my favorite things to do is at night get high and go down to the beach. Okay. And stare at the ocean. Oh, I used to love doing that. Oh, my God. That thing freaks me out when I'm high.

When you're high. It's a goddess. It's a monster. It's a living thing almost. It's a force. Yeah. It's a nature force that doesn a goddess. It's a monster. It's a living thing almost. It's a force. It's a nature force that doesn't give a fuck about you. I think there's one reason why people that live by the beach are so mellow.

Yeah. The beach communities are notoriously mellow. That's true. And I think one of the reasons why they're notoriously mellow is because they're faced with overwhelming evidence that they ain't shit yes you're sitting there looking out at the greatest like natural force that you could imagine it's an entire different world yes you're out there literally it's like if we had explained it in a galactic term it would be like you're parking yourself next to the membrane between dimensions. I mean you are literally in this world over here and right next to your face is a whole other world. Like we couldn't even imagine that but that's the fuck exactly what it is.

If you go like if you go to Santa Monica and you go over by where that pier is and you just walk along that sand and just start walking out into that water, you're in another world in like 20 steps. Absolutely. You're over your head and you're in another world in like 20 steps. Absolutely. You're over your head, and you're in another dimension that you can't survive in. You better get the fuck back. It doesn't feel like you went to another planet,

but you might as well have gone to another planet. Definitely. And it's right there. One of my strongest experiences of diving was, just to tell a little story, was diving off Tenerife in the Canary Islands. And I was down at a good 20 meters underwater, let's say 70 feet.

But there was a storm that day. And the huge swell on the surface was so powerful that it was smashing me against the bottom of the sea. Oh, my God. Bang, bang, bang. And just that moment, I realized I am in the hands of a gigantic force that I can do absolutely nothing about. There's nothing you can do.

The sea for me is a goddess. Fortunately, I got over a lip and down into deeper water and it was okay. Deeper water? Yeah, another 10 meters. What the fuck, man? How long did you have to wait it out? That was another story. Yeah, another 10 meters. What the fuck, man? How long did you have to wait it out? That was another story.

We stayed down for about 20, 25 minutes. We then had to come up. We'd been working quite hard at depth, and you get through your air. But what we hadn't done was recce the exit point. And when we surfaced in this heavy swell, it was extremely difficult to get out of the sea. The rocks came down quite steep and sheer. I think we discussed this before. You came up at a different spot, right?

Yeah, and it was bad. But anyway, here I am to tell the tale, an older and wiser man. Greg Fitzsimmons is a terrifying, he's a good buddy of mine, very funny stand-up comedian, has a terrifying story. He was on vacation,

he saw a woman drowning and he went out to save her. And he realized he was hanging on to this woman, swimming back while his kids and his wife and everyone was on the shore. And he was like, holy shit. Like, I'm trying to save someone here. And sometimes when people try to save people, they get drowned. I know. It happens often. Yeah.

It happens often. Yeah. And, you know, he said that the tide was a little bit too strong. He was always spooked by the riptide. The sea is something to respect. Fuck yeah, it is. You know, something to respect. Fuck yeah, it is.

That's a terrifying thing. But that's my favorite thing to do. One of my favorite things to do when I... To walk the beach late at night. Yeah. By myself. Smug a spliff. Just stand out there and stare by myself.

Puts everything in perspective. Yeah. It's just, it's like the ultimate... It's very psych... Not just psychedelic, but it's very isolation tank-esque in a way. It's an overwhelming's like the ultimate It's very Not just psychedelic But it's very Isolation tank Esk in a way

It's an overwhelming Amount of information But There's like Solitude And the sound And the noise That sort of drowns out

The rest of the world Doesn't totally drown it out Like an isolation tank does But it has a partial effect Because You get It's a moving But

Semi-static image Because it's these Water waves That are coming at you and they're very similar. So you get in this very similar thing over and over again with very little variation. And then there's the overwhelming number, the gallons of water that's just so in front of you. So you can't see past this fucking thing. And it's dark. So then there's the unknown. The unknown, which is the big freaker.

You're looking out out this black monster and sometimes when it's this black monster You get a better sense of it than when it's this beautiful blue thing during the day when the sun's hitting in it's reflecting Because you need to get all this visual stuff that's distracting you from the fact. That's a fuckload of water Giant fuckload of water, and it's right there. Yeah, and it could just go which yeah just come in like this and you're gone and everything's gone like a thousand fucking feet high waves can that's happened before it has has happened before 100 that's part of that's part also part of the new research that i'm doing um and i'm about to do a trip with randall carlson who's been on your show love him um you know randall was so far ahead of the curve in recognizing that the gigantic flooding

that came off the North American ice cap wasn't just caused by what I used to think it was caused by, which is that lakes of meltwater develop on the surface of the ice cap. And finally, the dam, the ice dam breaks and the meltwater pours out. Randall has been pointing out for years that the water flows were much too radical for that. Something much bigger had to be involved. So he was well ahead of the evidence when scientists began to realize that the North American ice cap had been hit by a comet 12,980 years ago, set in motion the epoch that geologists call the Younger Dryas. So Randall is a great expert in this area. My wife, Santha, is traveling with us as well,

and a friend of Randall's who's worked with him for many years called Bradley. And we're going to do a road trip from Portland, Oregon, all the way to Minneapolis, following the... It's about 2,000 miles, I believe, following the southern edge of the former ice cap. And Randall's going to show us the scars and tears on the landscape of what happened when that ice cap was instantly liquidized by a comet impact and huge tidal waves of water roared down off it across the land.

Good Lord. You're going to see that in detail with Randall. Really looking forward to doing that. Also, the first time I've ever crossed, well, most of America by road. I've always wanted to do that. There's certain spots you shouldn't stop. If you feel like you're in danger, you're in danger. Just get in the car and hit the gas.

Yeah. And do you know what country music is? You've got to listen to some of that. Yeah. Get a hold of some country music. You've got to fit in. You've got to blend in. Okay.

Can you fake a southern accent? Because if they think you're from the England... I can do my best, you know. You're from the England, they won't like you, man. They won't. They'll get very upset at you. They'll go down badly. You think you'relin? They won't like you, man. They won't. They'll get very upset at you. It'll go down badly. You think you're better than us.

What are you, Doctor Who? The funny thing is, in England, I often get mistaken for an American. Do you really? It's weird. Here, nobody's in any doubt what I am. But in England, I'm often- They think you're American? Yeah, or sometimes Canadian.

Whoa. Canada has a bit of that. There's like a certain amount of English, it sounds like, in the way they talk about things. There's a certain clear variation between them and us. Yeah, there is, definitely. Even I can hear that, and I've got a tin ear. I can hear that, too. Yeah, I can totally tell a Canadian after a while.

But so similar. Yeah, very similar. Yeah. Very similar. That's hilarious that anybody would ever think you're an American, though i know anyway it's going to be great i'm really looking forward to this my wife that sounds fantastic it's going to take loads and loads of pictures and we're going to go up in an airplane a few times and look at the look at the land underneath us and it's going to be a great exciting research trip and it's the last research trip for this sequel that i'm writing

i'm sure you've seen this most recent discovery about micro diamonds. Yeah, that's exactly it. That's precisely, that is the, that has finally settled it. Any scientists who were attempting to argue that there wasn't a comet impact. Now, with all the evidence that's come in over the last five or six years, it's just settled by the nanodiamonds

scattered in a huge swathe all over the world, which are a sure chemical imprint of a massive comet impact. And they know a lot about it now. It's really very, very clear. And this was an episode that changed the world. It killed off many of the megafauna that we've all heard of, the mammoths, the woody rhinos, and so on and so forth. And it got rid of what was called the Clovis culture, hunter-gatherer culture in the United States. And I think it got rid of what was called the Clovis culture, hunter-gatherer culture in the United States. And I think it got rid of a whole civilization

that we've only remembered in myth and memory. At least that's the line that I'm investigating. It's a fascinating line, especially when as each visit that you come back to the podcast, there's new information. The last time it was the nuclear glass that they discovered when they were doing core samples again, which is about 12,000 years ago, right?

And then the new one is this microdiamonds. It seems like over and over again, it becomes not a possibility but a reality that there was some sort of an impact. Something gigantic happened. All over the world, right? It wasn't just in North America. No, no, all over the world. It was massive in America, but the effect was everywhere. Both impacts, because this comet broke up into fragments like Shoemaker-Levy 9, both impacts, but also, very important,

the gigantic cloud of dust that's thrown up into the upper atmosphere. So you have this immediate reaction of flooding as the comet liquidizes part of the North American ice cap, and then a huge dust plume is up in the air all over the world, and the whole Earth is shrouded in dust. And cooled. And cooled because it's reflecting back the sun's rays. So we go into this 1,300, 1,400-year period called the Younger Dryas,

where the earth gets incredibly cold, even though previously it had been coming out of the ice age. It's truly a gigantic event. And then, weirdly, all our history, everything we think of as our past, begins at the end of the Younger Dryas. Kicks in 12,980 years ago, ends 11,600 years ago. The Earth begins to warm

up again, and everything we know about ourselves, or can claim we know, unfolds in that last 11,600 years. And the period before the Younger Dryas, we really blank on so much of it. It's so fascinating i said it again shit but it's it's it's amazing that all this information keeps coming up to support this and it's amazing if we do consider the possibility that it is true that everything

can be essentially shut back down to zero with some rocks from the sky and then that that's something that we really need to get in our head. That could happen. There is a very distinct possibility that we could be hit by something. The NASA photographs of the, I think they call it the black diamond, the earth at night. Okay. What you see is certain areas of the world are brightly lit up. Europe, North America, for example. On the other hand, Africa and large parts of South America are dark because there's no electrification in those areas. And those photographs are often taken to say, to speak of our achievement, look how we can light up the planet like a Christmas tree so that it can be viewed from space. But I would say it also says another thing, that if we were to confront again

the same sort of cataclysm that hit the Earth 12,980 years ago, then the people who would survive and carry the human story forward would be those very people who live in the dark areas, the areas that aren't electrified. And we who live in the glowing lights

that show up on those NASA photographs, who've become so specialized, who most of us are unable even to know how to plant a vegetable or hunt an animal, we're the ones who would be gone, and the whole order of the world would be reversed. Whoa. So the world would become like an ayahuasca culture.

You'd have all these fucking people from the Amazon that would be fine. Because they're fine. They'd be absolutely fine. They know how to survive. They know how to do it. So again, I think the message of this is we shouldn't be arrogant and complacent in the achievements of our civilization. We have done wonderful and amazing things as well as terrible things.

But we shouldn't be arrogant or complacent about it. We should recognize it's all very fragile. It can be taken away from us at any time. We can take it away from ourselves. Without a doubt, the information is something to consider. Just the information about these impacts. It's something to consider. And it's also something to consider that if that's correct,

boy, what a magical time it must have been back when they had developed some sort of technology that was enabling them to make structures like Gobekli Tepe. That's why I'm calling the book Magicians of the Gods because there's something magical, something about it that we would call magic, but perhaps was just another form of science. was just another another form of science well yeah whatever they were able to do i mean it's amazing that we haven't figured it out yet but we're so arrogant in our assumptions that it had to be all the ways that we've already figured out it's so silly because like isn't there some shit we haven't figured out yeah exactly like this new this new ability that they've just found out that they've taken people and they've used the internet to send information from one person's mind another person's mind 5,000 miles away.

It's incredible. But nobody else did that before that. So we didn't really think that that was – we thought maybe it would be a possibility, but now we know it's a possibility. Well, whatever the fuck they did to make these pyramids, like, just because we haven't figured it out yet doesn't mean they were using wooden rollers. Like, they could have had some really incredible technology that just – we don't have a trace of it anymore. We're looking at a form of technology That we don't recognize as exactly because we're we're programmed to thinking of it entirely in our own terms And it's almost like the universe is giving us a puzzle that's so

incredibly in your face with its most obvious results and because Because we have these preconceived notions that we're not willing to accept that as a possibility. Like when people look at the pyramids, they go, well, you know, the thing is they build ramps, and they use stone rollers, and like, yeah. There's a whole faction who will look for the most boring,

meaningless possible explanation. They might have done that. They might have done that. But the fact that there are large groups of people whose mission is to look for the most boring rather than the most extraordinary possibility, it's good. That's how we have balance in our society. We do need to look with a skeptical eye and say that there could be mundane explanations for this. But we also need to keep a tiny fraction of our research effort, perhaps a very small fraction indeed, to exploring alternative ideas.

very small fraction indeed uh to explore an alternative exploring alternative ideas because every now and if they do come out right they change everything in the way that the mundane things don't and it's really worthwhile and the only thing i'm understand why i've been subjected to so much criticism and i welcome it i've i've learned a great deal from that criticism but is it wise for us to live in a society which is hostile to the exploration of extraordinary possibilities shouldn't we actually protect that and make that something which which we encourage those who wish to do so in our society to do just on the off chance that they might come up with something utterly world-changing especially if it's done with careful

consideration like you've done or especially like what Randall Carlson's done with asteroid alimpax is absolutely stunning and fascinating. I mean and what he's done is done with very careful consideration Absolutely, Randall's real he's a real scholar real thorough researcher and investigator and he was awesome on the podcast Wasn't one of my all-time favorites yet these these ideas are fascinating But what I was gonna say was that it's almost like the number is so large Like two million three hundred thousand stones in the Great Pyram great pyramid it's which is so bizarre the numbers million tons yeah the number blocks of 50 to 70 tons roofing the king's chamber elevated to heights of 300 feet above the ground it's almost perfectly aligned to true north south east and west within a fraction of a single degree

you know so crazy that the like if they could come back from from the past and if they come to our time today and go wait a minute how did you guys think we did this you think we use slaves oh my god that's so funny yeah yeah you've got it come over here man tell them tell them how you think we made the pyramids slaves on wood get the fuck out of here he's really saying that they'd be like laughing, you guys haven't invented this magneto thing yet? No. Something that allows you

to turn stone into foam. You mean you don't know how to move things with sound? Yeah, you don't know how to manifest things out of the air? You don't know how to exercise the majestic and incredible

power of your mind to just move things? We're running out of time. We are. Unfortunately, man. And if we're running out of time, can I say again? Yes, please.

Because I am a big novelist. Please. Please. If anybody out there would time, can I say again? Yes, please. Because I am a big novelist. Please. Please. If anybody out there would like to take me up on this offer, just go to grahamhancock.com, go to the War God page, which you'll find easily, scroll down and see what to write to me. But I have to repeat again, I will send you the book plates, but I can't correspond. And it will be November before I'm in a position to send the book plates, because I'm on the

road continuously until the 27th. GrahamHancock.com. GrahamHancock.com. My goal is to make this so successful that you never make another offer ever again. I want to ruin you. So you can't sign all these things. You have too many coming in.

And you're like, what the fuck am I doing? I can't do this. This is my whole life now. I know. This will be the last one. i think it'll probably be the last one by the way there's chapters to read free online on the war god page as well so i'm not asking people to buy sight unseen they can have a look beautiful and your book fingerprints of the gods i've said it before when you've been on the podcast for changed my single-handedly changed my ideas about history changed my ideas not just not in any way discounting the amazing work that traditional historians have done, but just that these things exist that defy explanation and that

I didn't know. Just the fact that there is a guy from Boston University named Robert Shock, who's a prominent geologist, who said, this is clear erosion. And there was last time there was erosion was 9,000 BC. Like you're talking about an insane amount of time has passed since there was thousands of years of that rainfall, by the way. You needed thousands of years to do what we see on this. This isn't wind. Like this is some crazy shit.

That's what I tried to do in Fingerprints was to, you know, to bring together people like John Anthony West who brought Robert Shock to the Sphinx. Like Robert Boval, like Rand and Rose Flemath. A lot of researchers were working in the field and coming up with extraordinary information. And part of what I did in that book was to bring all that information together into a kind of synthesis, I suppose. It's such an interesting theory, and it's such an interesting subject, and now that it keeps getting substantiated by places like Gobekli Tepe or these micrometeors, it's sort of like pieced the puzzle together slowly but surely. I think as time goes on,

we're going to find there's going to be a bunch of civilizations that we uncover. Those ones that they're finding in Mexico and then, of course, there's ones that they're

finding in the Amazon where they think, just like we were talking about with the other, they find a hill and they think it's a hill and then someone realizes like, holy shit,

this is a building, guys. Huge earthworks in the Amazon, stone circles. You know, that's another place to look for a lost civilization we're out of time that's it right we're dying we're dying how much time we have

it's counting down how much time give me less than a minute less than a minute all right thank you thank you graham hancock thanks our sponsors thanks to me undies uh thanks to ting and uh thanks to draftkings.com uh go there and do that and use those codes. They were all earlier. I said them earlier. Just fucking rewind it, bitch. But thank you also to everybody tuning into this podcast. And thanks for all the positive feedback and everything.

Go to GrahamHancock.com. GrahamHancock.com and order the book. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it very much. Thanks, Joe. It's been fun. Say bye. That's it?

We're good? You can say bye. Thanks, Joe. It's been fun. Say bye. That's it. We're good. Bye everybody.